Nunaga

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About this book

'Single, ambitious, self-reliant young man required,' read a Hudson's Bay Company advertisement in the Glasgow Sunday Post one day in 1955; 'must be prepared to live in isolation.' Duncan Pryde, an eighteen-year-old orphan, ex-merchant seaman and disgruntled factory-worker, decided to try his hand at fur trading and emigrated to Canada. In Nunaga, Duncan Pryde tells of his discovery of a remote and primitive way of life to which, astonishingly, he found that he easily adapted. One of his first posts was isolated Perry Island then a refuge of fugitives from the law, where most of the male Eskimos were caught up in blood feuds. Pryde describes how, after a night-long fight, almost to the death, with the community bully, he won the respect and affection of these tough people, and came to share their life completely - all their concerns, joys and tribulations. He earned a degree of acceptance by the Eskimos that is granted to few whitemen; he witnessed the most sacred of Eskimo shaman ceremonies; he was paid the ultimate compliment - the invitation to share a friend's wife. His story abounds in high adventure - incredible, near-fatal sled and canoe journeys; seal, polar bear and caribou hunts; breathtaking encounters with the beauty of Arctic flora and fauna. Pryde speaks with authority of northern native life--the Eskimos' birth, death and marriage rites, their extraordinary tolerant sexual customs, their age-old and amazingly effective hunting skills, their uncertain future in a fast-changing North. His account becomes all the more valuable as traditional Eskimo s…

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