Page:Eskimo Life.djvu/215

Rh whale, the musk-ox, and the reindeer,' so the saying runs, 'left the country because men had too much to do with other men's wives.' Many men declared, however, that it was 'because the women were jealous of their husbands.' The jealousy of the women was also alleged as a reason for the fact that the channel which formerly went right through the country, from the Sermelik Fiord to the west coast, had been blocked with ice.

Egede relates that, strangely enough as he thought, the women before his arrival had felt no jealousy when their husbands had more wives than one, 'and got on very well with each other'; but as soon as he had preached to them the wickedness of such proceedings, they began to show much annoyance when their husbands wanted to take second wives. 'When I have been reading with them,' he says, 'and instructing them in the Word of God, they have often urged me to bring the seventh commandment sharply home to their husbands.' The men, as may be supposed, did not at all approve of the missionaries' influence over the women in this respect, and one of them, whose two wives had fallen by the ears, said angrily to Niels Egede: 'You have spoiled them with your teaching, and now they're jealous of each other.' It appears to me