Note 13 — CRIMINALITY.
Henry P. (Henry Pomeroy) Horton translation
Nansen, the celebrated explorer, in speaking of the Eskimos, among whom he sojourned for some time, says: “The Greenlander is of all God’s creatures gifted with the best disposition. Good-humor, peaceableness, and evenness of temper are the most prominent features in his character. He is eager to live on as good a footing as possible with his fellow-men and therefore refrains from offending them and much more from using coarse terms of abuse. He is very loth to contradict another even should he be saying what he knows to be false. If he does so, he takes care to word his remonstrance in the mildest possible form, and it would be very hard indeed for him to say right out that the other was lying. He is chary of telling other people truths that he thinks will be unpleasant to them; in such cases he chooses the vaguest expressions, even with reference to such indifferent things as wind and weather. His peaceableness even goes so far that when anything is stolen from him, which seldom happens, he does not as a rule reclaim it even if he knows who has taken it. The result is that there is seldom or never any quarreling among them.13