﻿NO. 7 



SMITHSONIAN EXPLORATIONS, I926 



151 



all this time the sensation was that of floating on a big lake, all boun- 

 daries of which could be seen at one and the same time except in the 

 southeasterly direction. There is no problem of migration here. It 

 was no great effort for people to pass from Asia to St. Lawrence 

 Island, or the Diomedes, or Wales, Nome, Teller, and even as far as 

 the Kotzebue or Norton Sounds and along the Arctic coast to Point 

 Hope and northward. The people today think nothing of such trips. 

 They have excellent big skin boats, much like the wooden Haida or 

 Tlinkit boats of the south, which are so seaworthy that in going to 



Fig. 150. — East Cape of Asia. 



Nome from the King or Diomede Islands the natives fill them to the 

 gunwales with dogs, ivory, and all sorts of household articles, and on 

 the return trip they pile in boxes and barrels of provisions. An ex- 

 ample of how little the Eskimo think of these journeys was witnessed 

 during the last call of the " Bear " at Nome. As the year before, 

 the King Islanders at Nome were offered the facilities of the " Bear " 

 for transporting them homeward ; but they preferred to be left 

 behind because they had yet some purchases to make and some few 

 articles to sell. They preferred to make the return journey in their 

 umiaks later, regardless of the storms and distance, which shows how 

 seaworthy these boats are and how practical native navigation was and 

 is in these parts of the world. And once they reached the northeastern- 

 most parts of the American continent, it was natural for the Asiatics to 

 pass on. They were not emigrating into a nezv world ; they merely saw 

 another land a bit ahead of them and went to it, and they had no 



