Intellectual Character of the Esquimauz. 313 
wise armed with guns, and who will crawl under cover of the 
drift timber, so as to surround them before they are aware; 
run, therefore, and tell them not to lose a moment in making 
their escape.” Notwithstanding this, and much more which 
I could bring forward if necessary, Dr Prichard can reconcile 
unto himself his quotation from Charlevoix,—* That, of all 
people in America, there is none who correspond more with 
our European idea of a savage; for they are ferocious, wild, 
defying, and restless, and always inclined to do mischief to the 
stranger.” 
Additionally, let us review the information which the various 
travellers who have visited this interesting people have laid 
before us. Tooloak, a youth, and two pleasing little girls, of 
nine and eleven years of age, natives of Melville Peninsula, are 
said to have possessed a capacity equal to any thing they chose 
to take an interest in learning. “ Indeed, it required,” says 
Sir Edward Parry, “ no long acquaintance to convince us, that 
art and education might easily have made them equal or supe- 
rior to ourselves.’”’ Sauer* has mentioned a native woman of 
Prince William’s Sound, who learned to speak Russian fluently 
in rather less than twelve months. In allusion to the natives 
of Labrador, Sir Martin Frobisher found them “ in nature 
very subtle and sharp-witted, ready to conceive our meaning 
by signs, and to make answer well to be understood again; 
and if they have not seen the thing whereof you ask them, 
then they will wink, or cover their eyes with their hands, as 
who would say, it hath been hid from their sight. If they 
understand you not whereof you ask them, they will stop their 
ears.”+ The natives of Melville Peninsula make use of winks 
and nods in conversing; the former conveying a negative 
meaning, and the latter, as with us, an affirmative. The na- 
tives of Schismareff Inlet, when urged to an interview by Kot- 
zebue, hit their heads with both hands, and then fell down as 
if dead; as much as to say that their lives were not safe: 
and, in order to make him understand the time it would take 
him to reach a particular spot, one of the little community 
* Sauer’s Account of an Expedition into the North Parts of Russia. 
+ Richard Hakluyt’s Collection of Curious Voyages. 
