eing flooded by melting
snow. Two or three wide rivers must also be crossed, which at this
season of the year are often swollen and impassable. It was clearly
useless to think of walking, so there was nothing for it but to wait for
some passing craft to take us down, a rather gloomy prospect, for
whalers were now entering the Arctic, and few other vessels get so far
north as this. We were lucky to find a white man at Cape Prince of
Wales, for the natives would certainly have afforded us no assistance,
and might, indeed, have been actually unfriendly without the firm and
restraining hand of Mr. Lopp to keep them in order. A wide and varied
experience of savage races has seldom shown me a more arrogant,
insolent, and generally offensive race than the Alaskan Eskimo, at any
rate of this portion of the country. The Tchuktchis were infinitely
superior in every respect but perhaps cleanliness, which, after all,
matters little in these wilds. With all their faults our Whalen friends
were just and generous in their dealings, though occasionally
disquieting during their periods of festivity. The Eskimo we found
boorish and surly at all times, and the treachery of these people is
shown by the fact that a few years previously they had brutally murdered
Mr. Lopp's predecessor by shooting him with a whale-gun. A monument on
the cliff facing the Straits bears the following inscription:

HARRISON R. THORNTON, born January 5, 1858,
died August 19, 1893.
A good soldier of Christ Jesus.
Erected by friends in Southport, Conn.

It is satisfactory to note that the cowardly assassins met with their
deserts, for the usual excuse of intoxication could not be pleaded for
this foul and deliberate crime.

Although many of the Prince of Wales natives were fairly well educated,
thanks to missionary enterprise, the Tchuktchis could certainly have
taught them manners, for the latter is a gentleman by nature, while the
Eskimo is a vulgar and aggressive cad. Thanks, however, to the untiring
zeal and energy of Mr. Lopp, the younger generation here were a distinct
improvement upon their elders, and the small school conducted by Mrs.
Bernardi had produced several scholars of really remarkable
intelligence. Amongst these were the publisher and printer of the most
curious little publication I have ever seen, _The Eskimo Bulletin_, a
tiny newspaper which is annually published here by the aid of a small
printing-press belonging to the