A Diary and Journal from the Second Grinnell Expedition

[verso]

8

I can already count eight settlements including about one hundred and forty souls. There are more perhaps; but certainly I here state the majority of the population, out of these I can number five deaths since our arrival, and I am aware of hardships and disasters encountered by the survivors, which [?] as they must be in the [?] cannot fail to resolve a [large?] mortality. [Both] crime combines with the [contingencies of] disease and exposure [operate] to their their numbers. I know of three murders within the past two years [by [?] narration from the relatives of the murdered] and one infanticide (Awahtok child) occurred only a few months ago.

These facts which [involve only such as] are open to my limited sources of information must [?] of course a much smaller mortality than the fact. [The actual results] They confirm however a fearful conclusion which these poor wretches have themselves communicated to us, that they are dying out -: not lingeringly like the American tribes but so rapidly as to be able to mask within a generation their progress towards extinction.

Nothing can be more saddening measured by our own [?] than such a conviction, [at least as it would be to [?] a] but it seems to have no effect upon this remarkable people. Surrounded by the graves of their dead, by huts [?] yet still recent in their memory as homesteads, even by caches of meat which, frozen under the snow by the dead of one year, are eaten by the living of the next; they show neither apprehension nor regret. Even [Kalutaneh?] a man of fine instincts and I think of heart, will retain his stolid face of apathy of [blank] by the aid of [?] extinction. He will smile in his efforts to count the years which must obliterate his nation, and break in with a laugh as his children shout out their ["Amna Ayia"?] and dance to the taps of his drum.

[recto]

9

How wonderful is all this! rude as are their ideas of numbers, there are those among this merry hearted peoples who can [thus] measure look forward to the fate of their last man.

[In return to my record of news] When Netelik now the receptacle of these half starved fugitives was obliged itself to capitulate with famine the body corporate determined, as on like occasions it had often done before, to migrate to the seats of the more Northern hunt. The movements of the walrus and the condition of the ice seem to be known to them by a kind of instinct: so when the light came, they harnessed in their reserve of dogs and started for Cape Alexander.

It could not one would suppose have been a very cheerful migration, women, babies, and young children trusting themselves into a frozen wilderness at constant temperatures before -30° and sometimes verging upon -60°. But Hans with a laugh which seemed to indicate some exquisite point [?] concealed appreciation of the [ludicrous?] said they travelled gradually in squads, singing Amna Ayia and when they reached any of the [halting huts?] eat the blubber and liver of the owners and danced all night! So, at last, they reached [Utaksoak?] "The great Cauldron" well known as Cape Alexander, and settled at a spot called Peteravek or the wellcome halt. [Whither I have seat to negotiate as before, mentioned].

At first game was scarce there; but the season was [closer?] at hand when the female walrus is tending her calf; and except the exposure of long jaunts upon the ice, there was then no drawback to the success of the chase. They are desperately merry and seem to have forgotten that a second winter in ahead of them. Hans said, with another of his quiet laughs, one half of them are sick, and cant hunt these do nothing but eat and sing "Amna Aiya."

(Description of Etah & incidentally Introduce Esquimaux Habits in dissertation)