Eskimo

"Sir, I was struck by two independent observations which occurred in your columns last week in regard to the etiology of scurvy, both tending to controvert the generally received opinion that the exclusive cause of the disease is the.........

prolonged and complete withdrawal of succelent vegetatables from the dietary of those affected. 

Thus Mr. Neale, of the Eira Arctic Expedition, says: "I do not think that spirit or limejuiceis of much use as an antiscorbutic ; for if you live on the flesh of the country, even, I believe, without vegetables, you will run very little risk of scurvy."

Dr. Lucas writes: "In the case of the semi- savage hill tribes of Afghanistan and Beluchistan their food contains a large amount of meat, and is altogether devoid of vegetables. The singular immunity from scurvy of these races has struck me as a remarkable physiological circumstance, which should make us pause before accepting the vegetable doctrine in relation to scurvy." These observations do not stand alone. Arctic voyagers have long pointed out the antiscorbutic properties of fresh meat, and Baron Larrey, with regard to hot climates, arrived at the same conclusion in the Egyptian expedition under Bonaparte, at the end of last century."

President's Address: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2036671/pdf/medcht00012-0097.pdf

"Dr. Charles Henry Ralfe, the son of a naval officer, was born in 1842. He received his medical education at the Bath United Hospital and King's College, London. After having been House Surgeon at the Lock, he entered at Caius College, Cambridge, and graduated with honours in Natural Science. He first came before the public as a general practitioner at Doncaster, but in 1869 he established himself as a physician in London. He soon obtained the appointment of Registrar at Charing Cross, and availed himself of the opportunities there afforded to work at Physiological Chemistry. His labours bore fruit in 1873 in the shape of a small but useful handbook on that subject. Shortly after this he became attached to St. George's Hospital as Demonstratorof Physiological Chemistry, and to the Seamen's Hospital at Greenwich as Physician. He used his special knowledge and his clinical opportunities in the investigation of scurvy, a disease which cannot be said, as yet, to have given up its secret, but which Dr. Ralfe threw light upon in pointing out the deficiency in it, not only of potash, but of the alkaline phosphates. He left St. George's and Greenwich on becoming in 1880 Assistant Physician to the London Hospital, which he continued to be until within a few months of his death. Dr. Ralfe died of phthisis, sequent on diabetes, on the 26th of last June, at the age of fifty-four. He was a type of the best kind of physician. He used his opportunities for advancing knowledge with ability and success, and without the purpose of an advertiser. He was cultivated and well-read, upright and honorable, kindly and personally attractive. His loss will be regretted by all who knew him.

"First, we may endeavor to ascertain through reliable travelers, missionaries, many of whom are educated in medicine, and resident physicians, what diseases of the skin prevail in extraordinary frequency, severity of type, or unusual form among tribes or communities, where a restricted diet of any kind has been long followed. Thus, among the natives of the northwest coast, fresh salmon forms the only food for several months, and dried or smoked salmon the exclusive or larger part for the rest of the year. The Eskimo lives almost wholly on blubber and raw meat, and other northern people mainly on pemmican. The inhabitants of some immense inland plains subsist almost entirely on fresh beef or mutton. Some tribes find their nourishment in the milk of animals. Millions of eastern people have no other diet than rice and a little fat."

THE BELUGA HUNTERS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES - A MERE 200 YEARS AGO - THE MACKENZIE River delta and adjacent coasts were the richest, most populous region in what is now the Canadian Arctic. About 30,000 bowhead whales summered in the shallow Beaufort Sea, 50-ton (45-tonne) feasts for hunters skillful and daring enough to kill them. There were Dall's sheep in the mountains, moose in the valleys, musk-oxen on the tundra, and in summer vast herds of caribou on the wind-swept coastal plains. 

Seals were common. Great polar bears patrolled the ice, and fat Barren Ground grizzlies patrolled the land. Here were the breeding grounds of much of North America's waterfowl: the myriad tundra lakes were speckled with ducks and geese, loons and swans. Rivers and lakes were rich in fish: char and inconnu, and immense shoals of herring and fat whitefish. 

Most important to the Inuit of this region were the milky-white beluga whales that arrived each year in large pods in late June at the edge of the Mackenzie estuary and remained for six to seven weeks in its shallow, sun-warmed bays and inlets, where they were relatively easy to hunt. The people were the Mackenzie Inuit, the "Beluga Hunters," as archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilization has called them. When he dug trenches through the thick refuse layers at Kittigazuit, the main village of the Mackenzie Inuit, "87 percent [of all bones] were of beluga." These Inuit took all that a bounteous nature offered, but the beluga large, easily killed, and abundant - was their favorite prey. 

While in other parts of the Canadian North the average population density was one person to every 250 square miles (648 km2), 2,500 to 4,000 Mackenzie Inuit lived in settlements near the river mouth. Inuit camps, specks of humanity scattered across the vastness of the Arctic, were usually home to a few families, perhaps 50 people. Kittigazuit, the main village of the Beluga Hunters, had a summer population of 800 to 1,000 people. 

Among the Inuit at Kittigazuit at the turn of this century was an orphan boy named Nuligak who lived with his crippled grandmother. "Because I was an orphan and a poor one at that, my mind was always alert to the happenings around me. Once my eyes had seen something, it was never forgotten." He became a famous hunter and, in old age, wrote I, Nuligak, the story of his life, wonderfully vivid glimpses of a long-vanished world. 

"The Inuit of those days [about 1900, when Nuligak was five years old lived on game and fish only, and fished and hunted on a grand scale." The 200-yard (823-m)-long Kittigazuit beach was hardly large enough for all the kayaks drawn up there," and the moment belugas were spotted "a swarm of kayaks was launched. At the great whale hunts I remember there was such a large number of kayaks that when the first had long disappeared from view, more and more were just setting out... Clever hunters killed five, seven belugas, and after the hunt the shore was covered with whale carcasses... Once I heard elders say that three hundred whales had been taken. 

The great driftwood racks and stages were packed with drying meat, sealskin pokes were filled with fat, ample food for "kaivitivik, the time of dancing and rejoicing which began with the departure of the sun and ended with its return," Nuligak recalled. "In those days the Inuit could make marvelous things": puppets and toy animals, activated by baleen strings and springs, that hopped and danced across the floor of their great winter meeting hall, while Nuligak and the other children watched in wonder. "There was such an abundance of meals, games, and things to admire that these sunless weeks sped by as if they had been only a few days. 

Until 1888, the Mackenzie Inuit had little contact with the outside world. That year the southern whalers came and the ancient, unchanging world of the Beluga Hunters collapsed in agony, despair, disease, and death. "Aboriginal Mackenzie Eskimo culture could probably be considered to have become extinct between 1900 and 1910," Robert McGhee noted with scientific detachment. 

In 1888, whalers reached the Beaufort Sea, last sanctuary of the rapidly declining bowhead whales. Six years later, 2,000 people wintered at Herschel Island, west of the Delta, soon known as the "Sodom of the North." It was the largest "town' in northwestern Canada, inhabited, according to a Nome, Alaska, newspaper report, "by demons of debauchery and cruelty," the scene, according to horrified missionaries, of "bacchanalian orgies."

Nuligak's memories are less lurid. He remembered the whalers more as friends than as fiends. "White men and Inuit played games together, as well as hunting side by side. We played baseball and wrestled. We danced in the Eskimo fashion to the sound of many drums. 

Unintentionally, though, the whalers brought death to the long-isolated Inuit. They needed great amounts of fresh meat. Musk-oxen vanished from the land. Few bowhead whales remained. In 1914, the Royal North-West Mounted Police reported that caribou were virtually extinct in the Mackenzie region. By then, the Beluga Hunters, too, were nearing extinction. 

As the plague had ravaged medieval Europe, measles and smallpox epidemics wiped out the Beluga Hunters, who lacked immunity to southern diseases. Of 3,000 people, fewer than 100 survived. In 1900, nearly 1,000 Inuit camped at Kittigazuit. In 1906, a single family remained in this village of death and decay. 

Into the vacuum created by the demise of the Mackenzie people flowed Inuit from as far west as Alaska's Seward Peninsula, and even Yuit and Chukchi from Siberia. Traders and trappers came from the south. And whalers from all over the world and from every social stratum - the dregs of San Francisco's slums and a Count Bülow, a remote cousin of the chancellor of the German Reich; Spanish- speaking Africans; Chinese coolies; and people from the Polynesian Islands - - settled in the region and "went native." One day in the town of Inuvik an Inuk girl, a sociology student, asked me: "Where are you from originally?" I told her I was Baltic German, born in Riga, Latvia. "Well, for heaven's sake!" she exclaimed. "My grandfather came from Riga. 

These people, then, part Inuit, part everyone, became the new Beluga Hunters, following, to some extent, the millennial customs and traditions of the nearly extinct Mackenzie Inuit. The changes wrought through the coming of the whalers were enormous, but some things had not changed: the coming of the belugas, the need for food, the ancient rhythm of camp life through the seasons. 

Even the remnants of this ancient whaling culture seemed fated to fade away. Professor Vagn Flyger of the University of Maryland, who studied the Beluga Hunters in 1961 and 1962, predicted confidently that "Eskimo whale camps will soon be no more," and Nuligak wrote in the 1950s that "the Inuit eat white man's food nowadays." In the late 1970s, the oil companies came, their made- in-Japan module headquarters, with gleaming offices and dining rooms, with swimming pools and cinemas, squatting on the tundra, with their spacecraft-like drilling rigs far out in the Beaufort Sea, all backed by multibillion-dollar exploration budgets. Yet, "the old way of life" persisted. When I went to join the Beluga Hunters in the summer of 1985, twenty-five families from the towns of Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvik, and Aklavik had "returned to the land," to ancient camps along the coast where Inuit had lived and hunted belugas for thousands of years. "From time immemorial this has been our life," said Nuligak. 

When Dr. John Simpson published the account of a two-year study in northern Alaska in 1855, he put his finger on a statistical difficulty when he said of primitive Eskimos that they “take no heed to number the years as they pass.”

At Point Barrow, a statistically valuable numbering was begun in the 1890's through missionary recording of births. The tally has established that in northern Alaska long life is not common. This, along with similar twentieth century statistical results from other northern fields, has strengthened two sets of convictions — the convictions of the frontier doctors and the convictions of their critics.

The medical missionaries, already committed to the opinion that primitive Eskimos were long-lived, see in the up-to-date figures confirmation of what they believe themselves to have observed, that Europeanization breaks down formerly good native health and thus tends to shorten life. But the critics of the missionaries, who always disbelieved what to them was a baseless legend, see in these first available statistics proof that the frontier doctors of the nineteenth century were deluded, and that primitive Eskimos were never either healthy or long-lived. I shall quote statements by a typical frontier doctor and one by a typical critic.

On behalf of the medical missionaries, and the rest of the frontiersmen, let Dr. Henry Greist speak (from Seventeen Years among the Eskimos, previously quoted at greater length): “For untold centuries ... the Eskimo of the far North was healthy ... He lived to a very great age.”

Order CETACEA

Cetaceans Balæna mysticetus Linn . Arctic Bowhead Whale. Ak'virk (Alaskan Mackenzie, and Coronation Gulf). 

The Bowhead Whale, the largest animal of the Arctic regions, if not directly the most important animal, on account of being the chief means of support of a number of Eskimo communities, has, through the large fleets of vessels engaged in the whaling industry, indirectly been the most responsible agent for bringing the white man's civilization into the western Arctic, with its concomitant effects upon population and fauna. Although whaling had long been prosecuted in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean west of Point Barrow , the first ship wintered at Herschel Island in 1889–1890 . Later other ships wintered at Baillie Island, Langton Bay, Cape Parry, and two small schooners even wintered as far east as Victoria Island. Whaling was prosecuted independently by Eskimos from Cape Prince of Wales, Point Hope, to Cape Smyth and Point Barrow , Alaska, and east of the Mackenzie, at Warren Point, Baillie Islands, Langton Bay, and other points, before the advent of white men. The Eskimos were accustomed to pursue the whale from their skin-covered umiaks and kill them with stone-headed lances, valuing the whale for its meat and blubber and not for the "whalebone” or baleen. Nowadays there is no Eskimo whaling east of Point Barrow, and the western Eskimos use modern weapons. The whaling industry by white men has become practically dead within the past few years. One ship and one gasoline schooner, the only vessels which whaled in the Beaufort Sea, killed twelve whales apiece during the summer of 1912, but the voyages were considered unprofitable on account of the unsaleability of bone. 

• The largest number of ships which wintered at Herschel Island at one time was fourteen in 1893–1894. 

• The largest catches are said to have been 69 whales by Captain Smith in the Narwhal, 1893–1895 ; 

• 67 whales by Captain Norwood in the Balæna in 1893–1895, 

• and 64 whales by Captain Bodfish in the Beluga in a two-year voyage about the same time. At that time whales were frequently killed near Herschel Island and Baillie Islands, but now they are much less seldom seen inshore. 

A good many Bowhead Whales are killed in the spring by the Siberian natives at their whaling stations at Indian Point, Plover Bay, and East Cape. Whalers say that in the spring the Bowheads do not follow the Siberian coast farther than East Cape, but strike across from there to Point Hope, Alaska, and follow up the American coast around Point Barrow, passing Point Barrow , going to the eastward from about April 20th to June 1st. 

After the Bowheads pass Point Barrow in April and May, little is known of their movements. Whalers are apt to be met with anywhere in Amundsen Gulf in July and August, as early as ships can get out of winter quarters. Whales are sometimes seen spouting off shore in Franklin Bay early in June. In August, in the region between Cape Parry and Banks Island, the whales usually seem to be coming south along the west side of Banks Island , and going west, although they often are seen in Franklin Bay until September . Following them up , the whalers usually find whales most abundant on the “offshore ” or “pea-soup grounds” off Capes Dalhousie and Brown, where the water is rather shoal, eighteen to thirty fathoms. The whales often remain here for some time and if scared away, soon come back. Whales killed here sometimes have mud on their backs as if they had been rolling on a mud bottom , i.e. , whales which are killed without sinking. A dead whale which sinks to the bottom often brings up mud as a matter of course. Bowheads have been chased into fresh water three fathoms deep near Pullen Islands, off the mouth of the Mackenzie River. No parasites are found on Bowhead Whales, like the barnacles and “lice” found on Right Whales and Humpbacks. 

The method of Bowhead whaling is to cruise about under sail, keeping a sharp lookout from the masthead during the whole twenty four hours. Bowhead Whales are very easily frightened and are very seldom if ever seen from a steamship while the propellor is working. Furthermore, after a whale is struck by a bomb, it is extremely infrequent for another whale to be seen in the same vicinity for an hour or more, even though there may have been many in sight before. When a whale is “ raised ,” the ship lowers all its available whale -boats. Each boat usually has a ship's officer as boat header in the stern-sheets, a boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow , and a crew of four oarsmen . A whale usually stays below the surface for a regular period, from twenty minutes to an hour or more, according to his individual peculiarity. When up, the whale moves slowly along, the top of back just above the water, sometimes just below , making a wake, every minute or two blowing up a white column of vapor to a height of from eight to twelve feet. After spouting several times the whale usually “ turns flukes, " raises his tail out of water, and dives down. After two or three risings, the boat-header can usually tell the rate of speed at which the whale is traveling, the direction of his course, and the time he is apt to stay below. The boat heads for the place of his probable reappearance, keeping a little to windward if possible. When the whale spouts again, the boat-header tries to run the boat directly across the top of the whale's head ,the most favorable chance. As the boat passes over, the boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow thrusts one or two tonnite (or sometimes black -powder) bombs into the whale's neck with the darting -gun. The darting - gun is a heavy lance - shaft with set-gun at tip. When the point of the harpoon enters, a stiff parallel wire explodes the eight-gauge cartridge which shoots the bomb into the whale. The handle is immediately dis engaged, the barbed harpoon -head remaining in the wound, and attached to the lance -warp (rope) , of which ten fathoms are kept in a box in the bow and one hundred or more fathoms in a tub in the boat. Sometimes a shoulder -gun is used after the darting- gun, if opportunity offers. The shoulder -gun is a heavy eight-bore, shooting a long feathered tonnite bomb with no warp attached . If struck fairly in the neck vertebræ , a whale is sometimes killed instantly with one shot, but sometimes eight or ten shots are required. The whale often tows a boat a long distance if only slightly wounded, and is sometimes lost by going under a large ice - field . As soon as the whale is " struck ” by one boat, the other boats come up as soon as possible, and as the whale rises he is struck as often as possible. On small ships the whalebone baleen from the upper jaw is sometimes cut off in the water, but on the larger ships the upper portion of the whale's skull is cut off and hoisted on deck entire, and the bone removed later. Ordinarily the practice of the Bowhead whalers in recent years has been to remove only the baleen, turning the carcass with its fifty or more barrels of oil, adrift. This is a most wasteful practice, but when "bone” was high in price, a single whale might be worth $10,000 in bone, and the captains preferred not to spend a day saving a thousand dollars' worth of oil, and perhaps lose a possible second whale. The meat of the Bowhead is good, the young whale's flesh in particular being much like beef. The " blackskin ,” or muk -tok , as it is called by the Eskimo, is considered a great delicacy, being usually eaten raw by the Eskimo, and boiled fresh or pickled by the white whalers. At Point Barrow, Alaska, the " Aloe-whaling” is done principally in Eskimo skin - umiaks, and the whalebone is cut out at the edge of the floe. A male which I saw killed August 23d, 1910, in Franklin Bay, was about 57 feet long, flukes 18 feet 4 inches across, and right fin or flipper 10 feet 4 inches around outer curvature. The whale yielded 2100 pounds of whalebone, the longest slabs (from middle of jaw) being about 11 feet in length.