Hunters Of The Great North (Paperback)

HUNTERS OF THE GREAT NORTH BY VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY COPYRIGHT, IQ22, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE if. . A. BY THE QUINN ft OOOCN COMPANY RAMWAY. N. J PREFACE WHEN first you leave home to travel in a foreign land you receive impressions more vivid than those of any later journey to the same country. If you at once rush your views and observations into print you are likely to have an interesting book but not so likely an accurate one. You will probably regret some parts of that book on grounds of mere regard for truth, for you will see later that you erred both in observations and conclusions. When first I went to the polar regions I came back at the end of a year and a half full of enthusiasm for the Arctic and for the Eskimos. Luckily that enthusiasm was translated into the organization of a second expedi tion that left for the North in seven months, and not into a book to be published then. As I look over my diaries of that time I shudder to think how vastly I might have augmented the already great misknowledge of the Arctic had I published everything I imagined I had seen and everything I thought I knew. At the Qjid of my second expedition, after five winters and seven summers in the - North, I published My Life With the Eskimo New York and London, 1913. So far I have discovered with the help of critics and through careful re-reading a half dozen errors in that volume. Some of these have been eliminated as the book has been reprinted the rest will be rectified in the next printing. At the end of my third expedition, with a background of ten northern winters and thirteen summers, I wrote Hi iv PREFACE TheFriendly Arctic New York and London, 1921. A comparison of that book with the earlier one will bring out few serious contradictions of fact I hope none, although it will show a changed point of view but only, I think, in line with a logical development founded on better understanding. In the present book I have tried by means of diaries and memory to go back to the vivid impressions of my first year among the Eskimos for the story of what I saw and heard. I have tried to tell the story as I would have told it then, except that the mature knowl edge of ten succeeding years has been used to eliminate early faults of observation and conclusion. A good many interesting stories found in the diaries of my first arctic voyage do not appear in this book because I now know them to have been based on misapprehensions. In a sense, the book is therefore less interesting than if I had published it fourteen years ago but less interesting only to the extent in which it is more true. The scientific collections made on the expedition described in this book are now in the Pcabody Museum of Harvard University and in the Royal Ontario Museum of the University of Toronto, for those institutions joined in meeting the expense of my journey down the Mac kenzie. The photographs in this volume are used by permission of the Peabody Museum, the American Museum of Natural History of New York, and the De partments of the Naval Service, Mines, and Colonization of Canada. Single pictures were furnished by persona friends of the author Harry Anthony, Hawthorne Daniel and E. M. Kindle. CONTENTS PAGE PREPARATIONS FOR A LIFEWORK OF EXPLORATION . . i DOWN THE MACKENZIE RIVER THROUGH 2,000 MILES OF INDIAN COUNTRY . . irFIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE ESKIMOS . . . . 37 CAPTAIN KLINKENBERG SEA WOLF AND DISCOVERER . 47 THE WHALING FLEET SAILS AWAY 57 LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO ON A DIET OF FISH WITHOUT SALT 64 How AN ESKIMO SAILED THROUGH THE STORM . . 78 AN AUTUMN JOURNEY THROUGH ARCTIC MOUNTAINS . 88 THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER . . . .100 LOST IN THE MACKENZIE DELTA 107 AN ARCTIC CHRISTMAS WITH AN ENGLISH COUNTRY GENTLEMAN 120 THE LIFE AT TUKTUYAKTOK 133 LEARNING TO BUILD A SNOWHOUSE AND TO BE COM FORTABLE IN ONE 150 TRAVELS AFTER THE SUN CAME BACK ......