682 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



had occasional opportunities, of which these are instances, to 

 enjoy the study of such examples of the capacity of insect sounds 

 to make music. Translated for The, Popular Science Monthly 

 from Ueber Land und Meer. 



-- 



ESKIMO BOATS IN THE NORTHWEST. 



By JOHN MUKDOCH. 



AS we came in sight of the Eskimo village at Cape Smyth, late 

 in the afternoon of September 8, 1881, some one called out 

 that a boat full of natives was coming off under sail to meet us. 

 We all rushed to the rail, eager for the first sight of our future 

 neighbors, and saw running down before the wind a large boat 

 shaped like a fisherman's dory, with one mast and a single 

 square sail, of blue drilling, which looked almost black through 

 the mist. 



As she neared us the sail was taken in and the mast lowered, 

 but the strong wind drifted her past us, and all hands were soon 

 busy with their paddles driving her up against the wind till they 

 were near enough to catch a line thrown from the schooner and 

 gradually haul the boat alongside. A strange party they were 

 as their boat was towed astern, dancing in the waves, while we 

 crowded to the taffrail to look at them, and hail them with the 

 few words of Eskimo that we knew. 



All were dressed in deer-skins, over which many had drawn 

 water-proof hooded frocks made of the entrails of the seal, while 

 others wore outside gay frocks of calico, fluttering in the strong 

 breeze which blew back the long hair from the men's foreheads. 



All were grinning and shouting, and very strange to us looked 

 the curious labrets or lip-studs which all the men wore at the 

 corners of the mouth, like a couple of large sleeve-buttons stuck 

 through holes in the under lip. 



But the strangest of all was the boat they were in. About 

 thirty feet long and six feet in the beam, she was merely a skele- 

 ton of wood covered with skin tightly stretched across this frame. 

 This was the big family boat, used for traveling and the chase of 

 the whale and walrus, the umiak. Like all the Eskimos who have 

 boats at all, and but very few do not use them, the Eskimos of 

 Point Barrow and Cape Smyth use two kinds of boats : one called 

 an umiak, a large open boat capable of holding fifteen or twenty 

 people ; and the other called a kayak, which holds only one man, 

 and is very like a racing shell boat or one of our " Rob Roy " canoes, 

 which, indeed, were modeled after the Eskimo kayak. It is nar- 

 row and sharp, and decked all over except a round hole in the 



