Free Big Miracle by Tom Rose Page A

stretches of Alaska’s northern coast to service their fleets with fresh food and fuel. These stations would serve as the first permanent inroad into Eskimo life. The isolated depots quickly grew in importance to natives and to whalers. For the first time, the Eskimos began to trade for goods.
    The whalers introduced the Eskimos to unheard-of luxuries like wood and textiles. The white man quickly learned the Eskimos’ strengths and weaknesses. Their strength was their uncanny ability to survive in the Arctic. Their weakness could be summed up in one word: alcohol. The damage was both instant and catastrophic. The white man was destroying not only the great whales, but the people who depended on them.
    Almost immediately after the whalers arrived, Eskimos contracted alien diseases and died from them. Early on, it was not unusual for hundreds to die of disease every year. Scores of Eskimos went to work for the whaling crews anxious to exploit their skills. Countless others were murdered by competing whalers—not because they were Inuit but because they helped competitors.
    We have to feel guilty about something if we are going to count ourselves among the modern sophisticates, don’t we? Surely, we must atone for one tragedy or another at all times—be it colonialism, trans fats, slavery, or secondhand smoke. So why not whales? Public confessions of guilt are well and good but guilt about the past without worry for the future makes the guilt offering incomplete. Thus public-issue worrying is tantamount to flaunting moral virtue. Besides, worrying works; it edifies and ennobles the worrier. Not to mention that worrying is both easier and cheaper than actually doing something.
    Even though more whales were now being hunted due to surging global demand, because the Eskimos were catching fewer themselves, more started dying from starvation, although no one has real or reliable numbers. Too many of their able-bodied hunters were too drunk to hunt. To make matters worse, the town’s anxious elders, unsure how to make their way in this new and unfamiliar world of enterprise and barter, offered to give American whalers the servitude of their best whalers in exchange for molasses to make liquor.
    In less than a generation, the long self-sustaining Eskimo community Thomas Elson discovered had been devastated. The changes came too fast for too many to adjust to. In less than two decades, both the Eskimos and the whales had been nearly wiped out. But one thing that had not yet changed was the Eskimos’ dependence upon the whale.
    The discovery and commercialization of crude oil that ended large-scale commercial whaling did not arrive until the first third of the twentieth century; too late to prevent much of the dislocation that devastated Alaska’s native populations. Barrow plunged into abject poverty—or so the narrative went. “Facts are stubborn things,” famously said John Adams, and there were just not enough facts about Barrow before time arrived to sustain any of the before-and-after poverty statistics. After all, the portrait of nineteenth-century Britain drawn by Charles Dickens is one of overcrowding, squalor, and grinding poverty. But where is the image of what came before Dickens?
    Why was London so crowded? Did the untold hordes flock to such a crowded, poor, and filthy place in order to make their lives still more miserable? Or did they come because they thought conditions we now think of as appalling, would be in fact better than those they left? So, probably, it went with Barrow. No matter how you slice it, Barrow’s population tripled in a century and a half after its discovery. The invisible living conditions before Elson were likely much worse than the poor but visible conditions seen after him.
    To survive, the Eskimos tried to resume their subsistence hunting ways. But the whales and the skills to capture them had atrophied. Barrow listed, even though its population