CRUISE OF STEAMER CORWIN IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN. ai 
On the coast of Siberia I heard an Eskimo boy sing correctly a song he had learned while on board 
a whaling vessel, and on several of the Aleutian Islands the natives play the accordion quite well, 
have music-boxes, and even whistle strains from Pinafore. 
From music to dancing the transition is obvious, no matter whether the latter be regarded in 
a Darwinian sense as a device to attract the opposite sex or as the expression of joyous excitement. 
This manifestation of feeling in its bodily discharge, which Moses and Miriam and David indulged 
in, which is ranked with poetry by Aristotle, and which old Homer says is the sweetest and most 
perfect of human enjoyments, is a pastime much in vogue among the Eskimo, and it required but 
little provocation to start a dance at any time on the Corwin’s decks when a party happened to be 
on board. Their dancing, however, had not the cadence of ‘a wave of the sea,” nor was there the 
harmony of double rotation circling in a series of graceful curves to strains like those of Strauss 
or Gung]. On the contrary, there was something saltatorial and jerky about all the dancing I saw both 
among the men and women. It is the custom at some of their gatherings, after the hunting season 
is over, for the men to indulge in a kind of terpsichorean performance, at the same time relating 
in Homeric style the heroic deeds they have done. At other times the women, more décolleté 
than our beauties at the German, for they strip to the waist, do all the dancing, and the men take 
the part of spectators only in this choregraphical performance. 
ART INSTINCT. 
The aptitude shown by Eskimo in carving and drawing has been noticed by all travellers among 
them. Some I have met with show a degree of intelligence and appreciation in regard to charts 
and pictures scarcely to be expected from such a source. From walrus ivory they sculpture figures 
of birds, quadrupeds, marine animals, and even the human form, which display considerable indi- 
viduality notwithstanding their crude delineation and imperfect detail. I have also seen a fair 
carving of a whale in plumbago. Evidences of decoration are sometimes seen on their canoes, on 
which are found rude pictures of walruses, &e., and they have a kind of picture-writing by means 
of which they commemorate certain events in their lives, just as Sitting Bull has done in an auto- 
biography that may be secenat the Army Medical Museum. 
When we were searching for the missing whalers off the Siberian Coast some natives were come 
across with whom we were unable to communicate except by signs, and wishing to let them know 
the object of our visit, a ship was drawn in a note-book and shown to them with accompanying 
gesticulations, which they quickly comprehended, and one fellow, taking the pencil and note-book, 
drew correctly a pair of reindeer horns on the ship’s jib-boom—a fact which identified beyond doubt 
the derelict vessel they had seen. At Point Hope an Eskimo, who had allowed us to take sketches 
of him, desired to sketch one of the party, and taking one of our note-books and a pencil, neither 
of which he ever had in his hand before, produced the accompanying likeness of Professor Muir: 
aa) At Saint Michael’s there is an Eskimo boy who draws remarkably well, having 
rustics that a clergyman has caused to be placed on exhibition at the Kensington 
Museum. 
the mouth only of which was laid down on our chart. 
Manifestation of the plastic art, which is found among tribes less intelligent, is rare among the 
ep taught himself by copying from the Illustrated London News. He made a correct 
} / pen-and-ink drawing of the Corwin, and another of the group of buildings at Saint 
Michael’s, which, though creditable in many respects, had the defect of many Chinese 
pictures, being faulty in perspective. As these drawings equal those in Dr. Rink’s 
es book, done by Greenland artists, I regret my inability to reproduce them here. 
BS As evidences of culture they show more advancement than the carvings of English 
| Sir John Ross speaks highly of his interpreter as an artist; Beechy says that 
the knowledge of the coast obtained by him from Innuit maps was of the greatest value, while Hall 
and others show their geographical knowledge to be as perfect as that possible of attainment by 
civilized men unaided by instruments. 1 had frequent opportunities to observe these Eskimo ideas 
of chartography. They not only understood reading a chart of the coast when showed to them, but 
would make tracings of the unexplored part, as I knew a native to do in the case of an Alaskan river, 
