LIFE AMONG THE ESKIMOS 233 



not have been more surprised and happy souls than were these Innuits on find- 

 ing I was really fast to a seal. Laughter, hilarity, joyous ringing voices 

 abounded. Almost the last Innuit who arrived to congratulate me was my 

 good friend Ou-e-la, accompanied by his dog, dragging a seal which he had just 

 captured. Last of all came the young ladies, Tuk-too and Now-yer, with dogs 

 and sledge, and a seal which Ar-mou had taken a little while before. All this 

 time nobody had seen my seal, for it was flipping away down in salt water 

 beneath the snow and ice, still fast to one end of my line while I held on to the 

 other. Nii-ker-shoo, with his pelong (long knife), then cut away the snow, 

 two feet in depth, covering the seal-hole, and removing still more with my 

 spear, he chiseled away the ice-lining just above the hole. Soon the seal came 

 up to breathe, and then the death-blow was given to it by a thrust of the 

 spindle of the spear directly into the thin skull. The prize was drawn forth — 

 a larger seal than either Ou-e-la's or Ar-mou's. Again the air resounded with 

 shouts and joyous laughter. It was the first case among them of a white man's 

 success in harpooning." 



Despite their skilj in the hunt, the Esquimos often suffer from hunger. 

 Capt. Tyson, who was with Capt. Hall on the Polaris, told of a visit to the 

 hut of an Esquimo known as Hans, to see a sick boy. He says : 



"The miserable group of children made me sad at heart. The mother was 

 trying to pick a few scraps of 'tried-out' blubber out of their lamp, to give to the 

 crying children. Augustina is almost as large as her mother, and is twelve 

 or thirteen years old. She is naturally a fat, heavy-built girl, but she looks 

 peaked enough now. Tobias is in her lap, or partly so, his head resting on her 

 as she sits on the ground, with a skin drawn over her. She seemed to have a 

 little scrap of something she was chewing on, though I could not see that she 

 swallowed anything. The little girl, Succi, about four years old, was crying — 

 a kind of chronic hunger whine — and I could just see the baby's head in the 

 mother's hood, or capote. The babies have no clothing whatever, and are 

 carried about in this hood, which hangs down the mother's back, like young 

 kangaroos in the maternal pouch, only on the reversed side of the body. All 

 I could do was to encourage them a little. I had nothing that I could give 

 them to make them any more comfortable. I was glad, at least, to see that 

 they had some oil left." 



This same Capt. Tyson interestingly describes the capture of a whale : 

 Captam Tyson, who was with Captain Hall in the Polaris expedition, thus 

 describes the killing of a whale, in which he participated : 



