For eighteen years I had been training them in my methods; or, to put it another way, teaching them how to modify and concentrate their wonderful ice technic and endurance, so as to make them useful for my purposes.

I had studied their individual characters, as any man studies the human tools with which he expects to accomplish results, until I knew just which ones to select for a quick, courageous dash, and just which dogged, unswerving ones would, if necessary, walk straight through hell for the object I had placed before them.
I know every man, woman, and child in the tribe, from Cape York to Etah.
Prior to 1891 they had never been farther north than their own habitat.
Eighteen years ago I went to these people, and my first work was from their country as a base.
Much nonsense has been told by travelers in remote lands about the aborigines' regarding as gods the white men who come to them, but I have never placed much credence in these stories.

My own experience has been that the average aborigine is just as content with his own way as we are with ours, just as convinced of his own superior knowledge, and that he adjusts himself with his knowledge in regard to things in the same way that we do.

The Eskimos are not brutes; they are just as human as Caucasians.

They know that I am their friend, and they have abundantly proved themselves my friends.
When I went ashore at Cape York I found there four or five families, living in their summer tupiks, or skin tents, From them I learned what had happened in the tribe in the last two years; who had died, in what families children had been born, where this family and that family were then living--that is, the distribution of the tribe for that particular summer.