Eskimos, [1] savage people of North America on the coast of Labrador and the Hudson Bay, extremely cold regions.

They are the savages of savages, the only ones of America that we have been unable to tame; short, white, fat, and true cannibals. We see humane characteristics among the other populations, however exceptional, but among these people everything is ferocious and almost unbelievable.

Despite the harsh climate, they do not light fires, they live by the hunt, and use arrowheads made from sea cow teeth, or from iron when they can get it. Everything they eat is raw: roots, meat, and fish. Their most common food is wolf flesh or sea calves; they are also quite fond of the oils that they extract from them. From these beasts’ skins they make sacks in which, for hard times, they secure provisions of this flesh, cut into pieces.

They do not remove their clothes and they live in subterranean holes that they enter on all fours. They make for themselves small tunics from bird skin, feathers inside, to better fend off the cold, and underneath another kind of shirt made of other animal entrails and skins stitched together with bands so that the rain does not penetrate them. The women carry their small children on their backs between the tunics, and take these poor innocents under their arm or over their shoulder to give them the breast.

These savages construct small boats from leather, and they cover the top, leaving in the middle an opening like a purse, in which a single man puts himself; then, fastened with a belt in this space, he paddles with a two-bladed oar and he confronts storms and large fish in this manner.

The Danish were the first to discover the Eskimos . The region that they inhabit is full of harbors, ports, and bays, where Quebec barques go looking to barter their hardware for the seal skins that these savages bring in the summer. Extrait d’une lettre de Ste Helene, du 30 Octobre 1751.  [2] See also, if you like, the accounts of Greenland incorporated into Northern voyages, and those of Baron de la Hontan. [3] But, do not believe that these books will satisfy your curiosity, they contain only fictions. This is not surprising as no traveler and no ship-owner has braved penetrating the vast lands of Labrador to speak with them. Thus, the Eskimos are the savage people of America that we know the least about to this day.

1. The French word “Eskimaux” and English word “Eskimos” are rooted in terms from the Algonquin language family. The prevailing assumption has been that “Eskimos” was derived from Cree words related to “raw meat”, including askâwa, askamiciw, and askipiw. More recently the roots of “Eskimos” have been associated with the Cree term for snowshoes, askimew; and the word for “snowshoe-netter” in Montagnais, a Cree-dialect. In the 1970s there was a movement to adopt the term “Inuit” rather than “Eskimo”. The adopted English term “Inuit” is derived from Inuktitut.

2. This letter’s excerpt can be found in Marie-Catherine Hequet, Histoire d’une jeune fille sauvage, trouvée dans les bois à l’âge de dix ans (Paris: 1755), pp. 64-68. Ethno-historian Giulia Bogliolo Bruna has identified here the letter’s author as Sister Marie-André Duplessis de Sainte-Hélène.

3. A reference to traveler Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de Lahontan (1666-c. 1710s) who was in New France from 1683 to 1690. He described his time there in Nouveaux voyages du Baron de la Hontan dans l’Amerique septentrionale (The Hague, 1703) , volumes 1 & 2. An English translation is available here.