The People of the Polar North/Chapter 32
THE EAST GREENLANDERS
In the summer and autumn of 1904, in the districts immediately north-west of Cape Farewell and at Kangigdlinguaq, I met with East Greenlandic families from the settlements south of the Angmagssalik territory, families which in separate little companies had migrated to the West coast to be baptized.
All these former East Greenlanders were, in spite of their baptism, only very slightly regenerated spiritually, and still spoke their own dialect. Their inmost convictions certainly made them acknowledge that the Christian teaching was better and wiser than their own, and for that reason they had adopted it; but they by no means, in their hearts, considered their pagan beliefs to be deception, rather regarding them as something forbidden them by their new faith.
All the pagan mysteries, all the supernatural forces which used to be the helpers of the magicians, still existed, but dared not or would not reveal themselves any more to those who had betrayed them to the Christians by their conversion.
There were formerly many people along the East coast, they told me; they lived in large houses, which could accommodate the crews of several umiaqs. In the winter, especially, they led a gay life up there, and for whole evenings they would entertain themselves with spirit incantations, duetsinging, insult-songs and the telling of old legends.
It was a happy time—but a dangerous time too.
During the other seasons of the year there was plenty of hard work to be done, to provide provisions and clothes for the winter. Then they settled in separate tents, in the neighbourhood of the good hunting-places. Each day brought its own incidents. The interest of the men was absorbed by their hunting, the women flaked meat for drying, and prepared skins. All toiled till they were weary, slept heavily, and were only anxious to be good and kind to one another.
But in the winter, when numbers of people were gathered together and the larders were full, and the only thing the desires centred upon was the shortening of the long, idle winter nights, things would be quite different. Much food and sitting still, the desire to be up and doing, and the craving for change and relaxation, made the people pick quarrels with each other; old grievances were resuscitated; scorn and mockery and venomous words egged on to outbursts of anger, and in the midst of the winter feasts regrettable incidents sometimes occurred, when men and women, with tempers sur-excited by ambition and the goading on of the other people in the village, forgot all fellow-feeling and often, on the most extraordinary pretexts, challenged each other to insult-songs, fought duels, and committed the most appalling murders.
Murderous desire in some cases developed into absolute mania, and the tales, invariably the records of actual experience, which I heard amongst these newly-baptized East Greenlanders, were such as to produce upon one an impression very different from one's usual conception of the peaceable Eskimos.
And these accounts seem to me to have a twofold interest, portraying, as they do, the last convulsive fight for existence of an isolated race.
All the South-east Greenlanders have now, with the exception of one family, migrated to the West coast and been baptized; and they will soon be absorbed into the population there. During my stay among them I wrote down a number of their traditions and legends, as well as a short vocabulary.
The last immigrants arrived in the summer of 1900, and they said that one family had remained behind in their country; this consisted of old Kunigsarfik ("Kissing Gear"), his wife, two sons, three daughters and a son-in-law. The old paterfamilias had been challenged by Autdârutâ ("The Umiaq"),—the leader of the new arrivals,—who accused him of having stolen the souls of his brothers and sisters; and the old man, not having dared to accept the challenge, had fled north when all the others left, and since then nothing had been heard of the family. Either they are still living in some remote little place or other, quite alone on that vast, empty coast; or they have died of hunger during a bad hunting year.
Of their journeys to the West coast in general, I will only say here that, according to old Nuissartoq's account (she is now baptized and known by the name of Rosine), such have taken place ever since the East coast from Umivik southward has been inhabited; but after Nalangarajik's (Graah's) stay among them, they began to go west to settle and be baptized. Graah had told them to do so, and several umiaqs had gone with him. It would happen, too, that people from all the way up to Angmagssalik would go down to trade on the West coast; but that was more rarely, as it meant an absence of three or four years for the journey there and back. As a rule, therefore, they restricted themselves to barter for goods with the people farther south, who had been at the trading-place.
Rosine told me that the Angmagssalik people were the most northerly dwelling that she knew. She had certainly heard tell that still farther north there lived some extraordinary people, who had no buttocks; they did not eat, but only sucked the nourishment from meat. But for many generations nothing had been seen of them, and now they are only known through the old legends.
In what follows, I shall depict a few episodes from life, in South Greenland and South-east Greenland, during the time of the breaking up and emigration.
As it seems to me that the Eskimos' own views and accounts of matters are of the greater human interest, my narrative will keep as closely as possible to the tales I heard from my various sources of information and the actual expressions I heard used. I feel it is only in this way that the account of these human destinies can retain its full educative importance.
I expressly preface these remarks, in order that no one may think I am "making copy" on the basis of facts that I have collected.
It was no easy matter at first to learn anything connected and coherent at all. This was because these people had, for one thing, repented of their past, and moreover, for a very long time had been accustomed to hear their pagan practices condemned by the priest and by their new compatriots.
There were all sorts of rumours afloat concerning me, when I arrived at the camp,—chiefly hawked about by old Christian women whose tongues required a little exercise. And of course rumour exaggerated and lied, as rumour always does. So I determined to begin by doing nothing, but simply to live amongst them, be as communicative as possible myself, and wait for an opportunity when the desire to narrate should overmaster their reserve.
I succeeded at length in winning the confidence of the newly-baptized people, and during my life with them, they gave me, without circumlocution, descriptions of the events that had been mainly responsible for their determination to migrate to the West coast and their resultant conversion to Christianity, Rarely has more animal conduct been practised by people possessing by nature unvitiated hearts; never have isolation and intellectual stagnation driven good people to more insane brutalities.
But I feel it my duty, before I proceed to the narrations, to emphasise the fact that I have rarely, in the course of my travels, lived with more cheerful, more amenable and good-humoured people than these East Greenlanders, who, had they lived in a civilised state, would have paid the penalty of the law for the most ghastly murders.
The light thrown upon the tragedies which have been played out among these solitary tribes on Greenland's eastern coast, is also of scientific importance; for these tragedies, recounted by eye-witnesses, demonstrate that the old Eskimo legends to a far greater extent than has hitherto been believed, are the Eskimos' own history, which has been handed down by oral tradition to subsequent generations. It has been thought There is no people with a history which, as regards the bitterness of its struggle for existence and the eeriness of its memories, can be compared with that of the Eskimos.
Hitherto one has always heard good-nature and peaceableness brought forward as the qualities that most peculiarly distinguish the Eskimos.
"They are so good-natured and so harmless!"
Yes, true enough; they are good-natured, and filled with a thirst for peace, in spite of all. And the more admirable are they! But do not for that reason forget that they are, first and foremost, men and women formed by the nature surrounding them.
The mind of the Eskimo can be calm and sunny like the water on a summer day in the deep, warm fjords. But it can likewise be savage and remorseless as the sea itself, the sea that is eating its way into his country.
Sophie Poulsen it was who gave me my first information. Her name was originally Besuk. When she came to the West coast with three umiaq crews in 1900 she was Neqigssanoq's second wife. Neqigssanoq received in baptism the name of Emanuel. Sophie's companion wife was her elder sister, Singime, christened in baptism Helena.
As they had the intention of being baptized, they were told to settle down in Frederiksdal, the old Moravian settlement south of Julianehaab, and there to attend a course of instruction, as a prelude to baptism, from the priest.
Emanuel was at once obliged to renounce the wife that he had taken last. It was an old practice among the missionaries at that place for the Church to recognise only the first wife as a man's real wife, quite regardless of the man's own feelings in the matter; the other wife was then declared a widow.
Thus it happened that Sophie, who had always been her husband's favourite wife, had to withdraw in favour of her elder sister, and adopt the black band round the hair which is worn in Greenland by widows.
Sophie thus suddenly found herself without a provider, and her little daughter, who remained with her, was supposed to be fatherless. No public assistance was given to her; if matters had come to the point of her requiring any, it would have had to be pauper help. (The fact that the priest was privately exceedingly kind to Sophie does not affect the question.)
The worst of it was that after the separation had been enforced by the Church Emanuel considered himself to have no obligations towards his former wife and daughter. The two were recommended to a family where they received food and lodging, on condition of the mother doing all the domestic work of the house. Clothes she would have to provide herself with, and this was not always an easy matter.
It is an old custom in South Greenland that every one who comes down to where there is a freshly-caught seal, gets a share of it; a little piece of blubber from the breast, from three to four inches long and a good inch across—with the skin on it. This is eaten raw, with the skin and hair, and is called tamorassâq ("chewing morsel "), because it is so agreeable to chew; you can go on chewing a tamorassâq for an hour. It is much appreciated by kayak-men on long journeys after seal; they declare that if you have a tamorassâq in your mouth, you get neither hungry nor thirsty.
These little pieces, which she could get by going down to the beach when the catch was being towed home, she put together in the spring and sold. In this way she managed to scrape a few pence together, which she spent on clothes; but of course it was very difficult to make two ends meet, and she The separation made a profound impression on Sophie, and at the present time she hates both her sister and her husband with all her heart. For that matter the relations between her sister and herself had never been good, as they were both very jealous.
"'I will have him all to myself!' I used to say to my sister, but of course she said the same to me, and as my husband generally preferred me, because I was younger, my sister was always unkind to me," explained Sophie.
So she cannot forgive her husband for failing her. "Do not talk of the shameless fellow!" she says, when he is mentioned. But neither does Emanuel himself seem to have been quite satisfied with the decision of the Church. This is evident from the following little incident which Sophie related to me.
One dark evening last winter, when she had to go and fetch water from the common watering-place, she heard a crackling in the snow behind her. When she looked round, she saw a man running after her, and recognised Emanuel.
She was alarmed, turned back at once, and cried out—
"No, no! I will not have anything more to do with you!"
And she started running as fast as she could. He ran after her, took a short cut, caught her up, and was about to seize her by the shoulder, but she sprang on one side, twisted herself from his grasp, and ran on.
"Wait, wait a moment; I have something to say to you!" called Emanuel.
"No; you have nothing more to say to me!" replied Sophie, beginning to scream, to attract people's attention. Then Emanuel stopped and called after her—
"It is easy to see that it is not you who go about ready to cry."
After that he made no effort to see her again.
During my stay in the camp, this Sophie told me, by degrees, the whole eventful history of her tribe during their last years on the East coast. And when I once had these facts as basis, it was not so difficult to get the information for which I was seeking, by questioning the others.
In the following, I have endeavoured to keep as closely to the original Eskimo tales as is possible in translation.
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