Nunaga: Ten years among the Eskimos

Duncan Pryde, a tough eighteen- year-old orphan and ex-merchant- seaman, left Glasgow to try his hand at fur-trading in the far north of Canada. His initiation into the realities of Eskimo life - the drink, the murderous blood feuds and the casual violence - reads with the gripping pace of a thriller.

The environment suited him, and Pryde spent ten years becoming totally absorbed in this new life, even in its most intimate manifestations. He learned to hunt seals and polar bears, witnessed the power of shamans, participated in wife-exchanges and even ran his own dog sled.

His record of life in the Arctic is not only an astonishing adventure but an unrivalled record of a way of life which, along with the igloo, has vanished forever.