Inherited tastes in foods, like inherited creeds, are mainly a matter of geography, or of history, or of both.  An Englishman had preceded us to the Arctic, going in in 1907, and the story of his food discrimination still lives in tepee of the Cree and Eskimo topik.  The North is full of rivers, the cold bottle is always at your disposal, and generally, if you are any shot at all, you can get the hot bird.  But this son of a thousand earls, or of something else, wouldn’t eat owl when owl was served, though he would eat crow.  Now, eating crow is to most a distasteful task, and the guides questioned the Englishman regarding the gastronomic line he drew.  “Aw!” replied he, “No fellow eats owl, you know.  Never heard of the bweastly bird at home, but crow ought to go all right.  The crow’s a kind of rook, you know, and every fellow eats rook-pie."

Having put the seal’s body into his own body and then encasing his skin in the seal’s, the cheery Eskimo strides the strand, a veritable compensation-pendulum.  The seal is so much an integral part of this people that if a geologist were to freeze a typical Eskimo and saw him through to get a cross-section he would have in the concentric strata a hybrid of Husky and seal.  Holding up his transverse section under the light of the Aurora, the investigator would discover an Arctic roly-poly pudding with, instead of fruit and flour, a layer first of all of seal, then biped, seal in the centre, then biped, and seal again.  This jam-tart combination is very self-sustaining and enduring.  Deprived of food for three days at a stretch the Eskimo lives luxuriously on his own rounded body, as a camel on his hump.

Reading an Arctic bill-of-fare in southern latitudes may give one a feeling of disgust and nausea, for it is all so “bluggy.”  You feel differently about it at 70º North.  You put prejudice far from you, comfort yourself with the reflection that raw oysters, lively cheese, and high game are acquired tastes, and approach the Arctic menu with mind and stomach open to conviction.  It is all a matter of adjustment.  Because raw rotten fish is not eaten in Boston or in Berkeley Square there is no reason why it should not be a staple on Banks’s Land.

We had brought with us on our transport two years’ provisions for the detachment of Royal Northwest Mounted Police stationed at Herschel Island, and we had been privileged to taste the concentrated cooking-eggs and desiccated vegetables which formed part of their commissariat.  Now, a concentrated egg and a desiccated carrot or turnip bear no more family-likeness to the new-laid triumph of the old Dominick or the succulent vegetable growing in your own back-yard than the tin-type of Aunt Mary taken at the country fair does to the dear old body herself.  Whale-meat is better than concentrated cooking-egg, seal-blood piping hot more to be desired than that vile mess of desiccated vegetables.  I know.  I feel like the old Scot who exclaimed, “Honesty is the best policy. I’ve tried baith.”