HERE AND THERE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3277, 3 January 1917, Page 55

HERE AND THERE.

The Blond Eskimo. —

Mr George H. Wilkins, a member of the Stefansson Arctic Expedition, has reached England after more than throe years spent in the Arctic, mostly among the Eskimo of Victoria Island, Banks Land, and the northernmost coast of Canada. In an interview with Eeuter's representative, Mr Wilkins (who is an Australian, and is now going to join the navy) described some of his experiences. He has collected a large number of birds and mammal specimens from the Parry Archipelago, a region entirely uncovered hitherto by the naturalist. Mr Wilkins spent a considerable time among the socalled Blond Eskimo, whom Mr Stefansson discovered on a previous expedition. They are quite untouched by Western civilisation. Human life is very little valued amongst them,, and what civilised people class as murder is regarded as a more or less harmless eccentricity. Visiting a camp where he had made friends with an Eskimo a few months before, Mr Wilkins was told that the man was dead, and the maimer of his death was this: One clay the man came across a member of the tribe fashionicng a knife out of the copper which is found in this region. He chaffed him, it appears, on his warit of skill. " i 7 ou don't know the first tiling about making a knife," he said in effect. The artificer said nothing until he had finished his work, when, remarking " I think it is a pretty good knife," he plunged it into the breast of his critic. The Eskimos have a keen sense of humour, and this incident was much appreciated. There is a ceremony of marriage among these Eskimos and apparently tho number of a man's wives is limited only by his capacity to support them. The regular price for a wife is a riile or 12 months' hard labour in the service of the prospective bride's family. It is only rarely that a rille can be obtained from the Indians to the south, and the price paid for it, in skins, practically represents a year's activity in hunting. Some of the more opulent Eskimos possess three wives. One is chosen for her personal attractions, another for her prowess as a hunter and fisher, while the third does the housework. Some of the tribes are not above the suspicion of cannibalism, and there is a case now pending in which two Roman Catholic missionaries were killed and parts of their bodies eaten. But the arm of tho Canadian police is long, and it has been stretched out even to these remote limits, and has taken the culprits in charge. They, however, do not in the least understand the enormity of their offence. Reptiles' Names to Warships.—

So guarded are our secrets that we are not allowed to know even the names of the scores of new ships which arc being launched almost every day for the navy. But it is safe to say that, whatever names are being used, the Admiralty are fighting very shy of those of reptiles. The ill-luck attendant on warships bearing the names of reptiles is almost beyond coincidence. The first of our fast turbine destroyers was the Viper. She Avas only 312 tons, but had engines of 10,OCO horsepower, and could do 35 knots. During naval manoeuvres she ran into fog, struck the rocks off the Channel Islands, and broke into three pieces. Three other Vipers have now been lost at different times. The Cobra a similar vessel to the Viper, broke her back in the North Sea. Some say she hit a whale ; some that it was merely force of wave and weather. In 1890 the Serpent, a gunboat, went on the rocks off the north coast of Spain, with terrible loss of life. The death roll was 173. Three other Serpents have been lost at different times, three Lizards, two Snakes, one Basilisk, and one Crocodile. Does anyone wonder, then, that even the modern -l matelot," who has fewer superstitious than his predecessors, carefully avoids ships with " snaky " names? —The Heat of the Persian Gulf.— It was recently recorded that a hospital ship, on her way down the Persian Gulf to Bombay, was forced to stop every four hours and turn round, so as to allow a little breeze to drift down the ventilator's and relieve the unbearable heat between decks. Even so. several patients died from heat-stroke. The Persian Gulf and its coasts are in summer about the hottest place on earth's surface, a temperature of 120dcg ifi the shade being not uncommon, while a black-bulb solar thermometer has registered 187 deg in the sum When one remembers that the hottest room in a Turkish bath is usually kept at about 160 deg, the appalling nature of this Persian neat will be better realised. The greatest heat ever known in England was on August 18, 1893, when a shade temperature of 95c!eg was registered : but on this (lav the sun temperature did not quite equal that of duly 28. 1835, when 162 deg Fahr, were registered in the open air. When yon consider facts like these it is difficult to believo that our nlanet receives only one two-thousand-millionth part of the rays Hung out by the sun. —Buried Treasure.—

There nre quite a number of islands scattered about the globe whereon buried treasure exists. And people are always trying to find it. Quite a score of attempts have been made, for instance, to unearth the treasure alleged to be buried on Cocos Island. Yet so far the adventurers have reaped no reward for, Hieir toil. Fully £50,000 has been wasted,

again, in futile attempts to recover the "pirates' hoard" reported to be hidden near the |ip of the crater of an active—very active—volcano on Pagan Island, in the Ladrone Group. Still, as a set-off against many failures, there have been some few successes. There is no doubt (says a Home paper), for instance, that a Liverpool sailor named John .Adams unearthed treasure to the value of between £150,000 and £200,000 on Auckland Island some years back; nor that William Watson, a shepherd, recovered in 1868 nearly a ten of gold that had been hidden on one of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Likewise, two runaway seamen, named ITandley and Cross, successfully located and dug up a valuable hoard oii Oak Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and this after many others had failed. —The Duke of Atholl's Army.—

Most of the 250 Highland "giants" who compose the Duke of Atholl's private army are now at the front. The Highlanders have always been "bonny fechters," and the Atholl men, who have been absorbed mostly in the Scottish Horse, which was raised by the Duke of Atholl during the South African war, arc keeping alive the traditions of the elan which played so prominent a part in early Scottish warfare. The Duke of Atholf is in the unique position of being the only one of King George's subjects who maintains an "army" of his own within the boundaries of Great Britain.