One of the academics present at the meeting, William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, states that during an 1860 expedition to the western coast of Greenland, he encountered "a singular tribe of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness". Webb claims the Greenland cult possessed both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish. Thurston, the narrator, reflects that "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were.”