468 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



is considerably under the freezing-point, exceedingly defective 

 tents or huts made with the skin boats that may happen to 

 be available. Thus a young couple who returned in spring to 

 Pitlekaj lived happy and content in a single thin and ragged 

 tent or conical skin hut which below where it was broadest was 

 only two and a half metres across. An accurate inventory, 

 which I took during the absence of the newly married pair, 

 showed that their whole household furniture consisted of a bad 

 lamp, a good American axe, some reindeer skins, 

 a small piece of mirror, a great many empty 

 preserve tins from the Vega, which among other 

 things were used for cooking, a fire-drill, a comb, 

 leather for a pair of moccasins, some sewing im- 

 plements, and some very incomplete and defective 

 tools. 



The boats are made of walrus skin, sewed together 

 and stretched over a light frame-work of wood and 

 pieces of bone. The different parts of the frame- 

 work are bound together with thongs of skin or 

 strings of whalebone. In form and size the 

 Chukches' large boat, atkuat, called by the 

 Russians haydar, corresponds completely with the 

 Greenlander's umiak or woman's boat. It is so 

 light that four men can take it upon their 

 shoulders, and yet so roomy that thirty men can 

 be conveyed in it. One seldom sees anathuat, or 

 boats intended for only one man ; they are much 

 worse built and uglier than the Greenlander's 

 kayak. The large boats are rowed with broad- 

 bladed oars, of which every man or woman 

 manages only one. By means of these oars a 

 sufficient number of rowers can for a little raise 

 the speed of the boat to ten kilometres per hour. 

 Like the Greenlanders, however, they often cease 

 rowing in order to rest, laugh, and chatter, then 

 row furiously for some minutes rest themselves 

 again, row rapidly, and so on. When the sea is 

 covered with thin newly formed ice they put two 

 CHURCH OAR. jj^en in the fore of the boat with one leg over 



One-sixteenth of . i , i ^ ii • • • 



the natural size, m Order to trample the ice m pieces. 



During winter the boats are laid up, and instead 

 the dog-sledges are put in order. These are of a different con- 

 struction from the Greenland sledges, commonly very light antl 

 narrow, made of some flexible kind of wood, and shod with plates 

 of whales' jawbones, whales' ribs, or whalebone. In order to im- 

 prove the running, the runners before the start are carefully 

 covered with a layer of ice from two or tliree millimetres in 



