WITH THE ESKIMOS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18949, 21 February 1925, Page 2 (Supplement)

WITH THE ESKIMOS.

MISSIONARY'S VAST PARISH. .AMID ICE AND SNOW. VISITING BY DOG SLEDGE. With a parish extending 1000 miles from the iiorther'n shores ot Labrador to Baffin's Bay and Davis Straits, the Rev. Samuel Mi Hi ken Stewart, of the Colonial and Continental Church So/iety, cannot complain of want of room for his labours. .To spite of ten month's ice and snow, and a temperature sinking occasionally to 60 below zero, Mr. Stewart seems to have taken little bodily barm. He spoke, recently, to a, newspaper representative, with enthusiasm, of the success of his work. "Wo have no 'rice Christians' in my parish," he said. "The Eskimos are a clean-living and sturdy race, and they accept- the truths of the Gospel and carry its precepts into their daily life. "They speak a, curious language, in which cases and tenses are all added on to the root- word, so that we. sometimes get words of 40 or 50 letters. There is a difficulty in reducing it to writing in Roman letters, so we have introduced a system of shorthand called the "CreeSvllahic," which has only 64 phonetic characters.

' *J3v means of this we are able to transla* c portions of Scripture and tracts, which |he men learn in read in two or three, weeks. They arc great leaders when they get the chance during the long, dark months of winter. "The chief food of the people is seal and fish. Hard biscuits they get from the whalers and other traders. They have no money, and all trade is carried on by barter--skins, ivory, and furs. ''There are great quantities of salmon in the rivers, and trout of a large size in the lakes, hut there are no cereals of any kind. Edible berries are plentiful in some places. "The cold is sometimes awful. I travel round my parish with dogs and a sledge, and on one occasion the cold was so terrible that some of the dogs died. Yet I cannot say that I have felt any illeffects from it. "1 he people have a very high code of morals: they do riot drink, and thev are very helpful to each other. Many interesting sagas are handed down from father to son."