ABORIGINAL AMERICAN HARPOONS. 



301 



all the animals draw in the same direction. If one of them seeks to 

 take a different oonrse from that of his comrades in misfortune his 

 line nmst be cut off, otherwise the boat capsizes. When 

 the walruses get exhausted b}- their exertions and by loss 

 of blood, the hunters begin to haul in the lines. One 

 animal after another is drawn to the stem of the boat, 

 and there they commonly first get a blow on the head 

 with the flat of a lance, and when they turn to guard 

 against it a lance is thrust into the heart. ^ AVhateyer 

 view one takes regarding the blood kinship between 

 the peoples of northeastern Asia 

 and those of North America, or 

 between the languages of the 

 two areas, the kinship of inven- 

 tions is not to be denied. How 

 far a device may travel or be 

 transmitted without changing so 

 nuich as one word in any lan- 

 guage or one drop of ])lood is not 

 known. A whale has been known 

 to carry a harpoon head halfway 

 around the world and deliver it 

 safely to a company of natives on 

 the other side: and a throwing 

 stick, with which hai*poons are 

 hurled, drifted from Bering 

 Strait to western Greenland. 



The harpoon has been briefl}' 

 traced throughout the Western 

 Hemisphere. It remains to no- 

 tice one or two forms in which 

 the sailor and the blacksmith 

 have supplanted almost entireh' 

 the aboriginal mechanic. Boas 

 figures an iron toggle head (1888. 

 p.-IT3) now in the Berlin Museum 

 of Ethnology. It is of iron, pre- 

 serves the general shape of the native barbed 

 and toggle head, the blade, spurs, and line hole 

 being in parallel planes. The natives, according 

 to Boas, also file these heads out of bits of iron. 

 The end of the line is bent, run through the line 

 hole, and fastened down by a compound splice (fig. 89). The fact has 

 been already mentioned that toggle heads of bone were made wholesale 



Fig. 90. 

 IRON" TOGGLE HEAD. 



Amur River. 

 After von Schrenk. 



Fig. 89. 



MODERN HARPOON' 



HEAD OF IRON'. 



Cumberland Sonivl. 



In Berlin Museum fiir 

 Volkerkunde. :>fter 

 Franz Bo.as. 



' A. E. Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, I, 1881, p. 156. 

 NAT MUS 1900 22 



