Among the unfavourable traits in their character must be reckoned an extreme disposition to envy, which displayed itself on various occasions during our intercourse with them.  If we had made any presents in one hut, the inmates of the next would not fail to tell us of it, accompanying their remarks with some satirical observations, too unequivocally expressed to be mistaken, and generally by some stroke of irony directed against the favoured person.  If any individual with whom we had been intimate happened to be implicated in a theft, the circumstance became a subject of satisfaction too manifest to be repressed, and we were told of it with expressions of the most triumphant exultation on every occasion.  It was, indeed, curious, though ridiculous, to observe that, even among these simple people, and even in this obscure corner of the globe, that little gossip and scandal so commonly practised in small societies among us were very frequently displayed.  This was especially the case with the women, of whom it was not uncommon to see a group sitting in a hut for hours together, each relating her quota of information, now and then mimicking the persons of whom they spoke, and interlarding their stories with jokes evidently at the expense of their absent neighbours, though to their own infinite amusement.

I have already, in the course of the foregoing narrative, hinted at the want of gratitude evinced by these people in their transactions with us.  Some exceptions, for they were only exceptions, and rare ones, to this rule, have been mentioned as they occurred; but in general, however considerable the benefit conferred, it was forgotten in a day; and this forgetfulness was not unfrequently aggravated by their giving out that their benefactor had been so shabby as to make them no present at all.  Even those individuals who, either from good behaviour or superior intelligence, had been most noticed by us, and particularly such as had slept on board the ships, and whether in health or sickness had received the most friendly treatment from everybody, were in general just as indifferent as the rest; and I do not believe that any one among them would have gone half a mile out of his road, or have sacrificed the most trivial self-gratification to serve us.  Okotook and Iligliuk, whom I had most loaded with presents, and who had never offered me a single free gift in return, put into my hand, at the time of their first removal from Winter Island, a dirty, crooked model of a spear, so shabbily constructed that it had probably been already refused as an article of barter by many of the ship’s company.  On my accepting this, from an unwillingness to affront them, they were uneasy and dissatisfied till I had given them something in return, though their hands were full of the presents which I had just made them.  Selfishness is, in fact, almost without exception, their universal characteristic, and the mainspring of all their actions, and that, too, of a kind the most direct and unamiable that can well be imagined.