Of their Diet, and manner of dressing their Victuals.

THE Greenlanders’ provision and victuals are flesh and fish meat (for the country affords no other kind of provision) as rein deer, whales, seals, hares, and rypes, or white partridges, and all sorts of sea fowls. They eat their flesh meat sometimes raw, sometimes boiled, or dried in the sun or wind; but their fish meat is always thoroughly done, or they eat it dried in the sun or air, as salmon, roe-fish, halibut, or the small stints, which, in the months of May and June, they catch in great abundance, and keep them cured and dried for winter provisions. And whereas, in the winter season, it is very rare to get seals, except in the{136} most Northern parts where they take them upon the ice; so they make all the provision of them they can get in the fall, and bury them under the snow, until the winter comes on, when they dig them up, and eat them raw and frozen as they are. Their drink is nothing but water, and not, as some writers have wrongly pretended, train oil; for they do not so much as eat the fat, but only in sauces to their dried fish.

Furthermore, they put great lumps of ice and snow into the water they drink, to make it the cooler to quench their thirst. They are, taking them in general, very hoggish and dirty in their eating and dressing of their victuals; they never wash, cleanse, or scour the kettles, pots, or dishes, in which they dress, and out of which they eat their victuals; which when dressed, they often lay down upon the dirty ground, which they walk upon, instead of tables. They will, with so great an appetite and greediness, feed upon the rotten and stinking seal flesh, that it turns{137} the stomach of any hungry man who looks upon them. They have no set time for their meals, every man eats when he is hungry, except when they go to sea, and then their chief repast is a supper, after they are come home in the evening; and he, whose supper is first ready, calls his neighbours to come and partake of it, as he does again with them reciprocally; and so it goes round............