[Granville-Hough] 13 Feb 2010 - Fat and Blubber

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:19:40 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Fat and blubber 13 Feb 2010

    When I was in Thule, Greenland, I learned about some of the 
adaptations of the human body to cold.  The Eskimos had survived there 
for about 1000 years by living with the climate, and not fighting it.  
Their diet was heavy on seal fat or blubber,  and they ate it raw as 
well as cooked.  Fish was food for the sled dogs, as its fat content was 
low.  They would kill and eat polar bears, but the skins were what they 
wanted for making garments, bedding, etc.  As they had no other way to 
cure skins, they used human urine.  That gave the Eskimos a distinctive 
smell. 
    When the American began resupply operations for the Engineering 
station out under the glacier.  they went in a snow train that took 
several days.  Vehicles of the snow train had very wide treads and 
followed the leader very closely.  They slept in their vehicles, but the 
cold got through everything.  They told me that the second day out, they 
just wanted to eat fat, or butter.  Bacon was a favorite, cooked or 
raw.  They would get back and spend two or three days getting back to a 
normal diet. 
    Some arctic creatures had unusual characteristics the Eskimos had 
learned about.  The layer of fat under the narwhal's skin, for example, 
was the highest concentration of Vitamin C which could be found.  When 
one was harpooned, it was pulled to a solid surface of ice or land and 
skinned.  The Eskimos clamored for the fat under the skin, as they knew 
it made you feel better. 
    The Eskimos had to sleep on solid ice or land, so the polar bear 
skin was placed on the solid surface, skin down, so the fur was up.  
Then the covering skin was placed on the top with the fur down.  So you 
slept in the polar bear fur, with no clothes on.  You hung your work 
clothes up and they froze dry, so you could shake or beat out the ice 
the next morning.  If you slept in your work clothes, you perspired  and 
had trouble the next day with frozen skin surfaces. 
    When the first European explorers learned about Eskimo customs.  
they failed to appreciate their value and the Europeans had heavy 
casualties.  At one time the Eskimo was considered a different species 
because the women only gave birth about every four years.  The truth was 
that the child had to be breast fed until about four or five years old, 
and any woman, of whatever race, does not easily get pregnant while 
breast feeding.  To supplement the breast feeding, the mother chewed up 
fat and blubber and then fed it to the child, just like birds feed their 
young.
    God gave the Eskimos enough sense to survive in a frozen land.  A 
few of the Vikings from the Greenland settlements of Lief Ericson joined 
them in the search for food, and they have the same Viking YDNA as the 
Hough families from Western England.  I'm glad our distant cousins are 
part of the Greenlander population.  Grandpa Hough