CHAPTER XVI.

AMONG THE ESKIMOS.

THE success which has attended the labours of the Lutheran and Moravian

Missionaries among the Eskimos has been well deserved by their self-denying
devotedness. Few of the Arctic tribes are now outside the pale of Christianity;
and all have been more or less directly influenced by its elements of purification
and elevation. But prior to the coming of the pioneers of the Cross, the moral
code of the Eskimo was curiously imperfect, and did not recognise murder,
infanticide, incest, and the burial of the living among its crimes. Woe to the
unfortunate vessel which touched upon the coast! The Eskimos were not less
treacherous than the Polynesians of the Eastern Seas. And Krantz relates the
story of a Dutch brig that was seized by the natives at the port of Disco in 1740.
The whole crew were murdered. Two years later a similar fate befell the crew of
another vessel that had accidentally stranded.

The religion or creed of the aborigines seems to have been very vague and
imperfect. It is certain, however, that they believed in the immortality of the
spirit, and in a heaven and a hell. It was natural enough that their conception of
the latter should be affected by the conditions under which they lived; that their
experience of the miseries of an Arctic climate should lead them to think of hell
as a region of darkness and of ice, traversed by endless snow-storms, and
without any seals.

They placed implicit confidence in their angekoks, or angekos, or “medicine-
men,” ascribing to them almost unlimited powers over the things of earth and
sea, this world and the next. When setting out for the chase, or prostrated by
illness, they always sought the assistance of the angekoks, who, on such
occasions, indulged in a variety of strange ceremonies. The nature of these may
be inferred from what was witnessed by Captain Lyon, who, during his famous
Arctic voyage, bribed an angekok, named Toolemak, to summon a Tomga, or
familiar demon, in the cabin of his ship.