146 Polar Explorations. 
they have consumed or driven away the seals and walruses, 
when they remove to some other part of the ice, in sledges 
drawn by wolf dogs, where they stay until compelled by the 
same cause to seek another station. In summer they obtain 
fish, rein deer, and a few birds. The tl eat their food 
y striking pieces of iron pyrites against 
each other, over a plat of rubbed moss. Their dress made of 
an 
mittens for their hands. A large deep hood serves the dou- 
ble purpose of covering the head, and carrying the children. 
The Esquimaux seen by Capt. Franklin, on the McKenzie, 
were hostile and quarrelsome; traits acquired from the neigh- 
boring Indians, who are always at war with them for the 
means of subsistence. Those near Hudson’s strait are more 
depraved than any seen on this continent, their capacity for, 
mischief and crime, having been rapidly developed by their 
intercourse with traders and others. 
e Greenland Esquimaux treat their women with more se- 
savages, but the similarity which otherwise prevails amon, 
em, appears to spring from the sameness of their avoca- 
tions—the dreariness of their country, and the hardships 
which benumb their faculties. ee 
The huts of the Esquimaux are superior in ingenuity and 
neatness to those of the Kamschatdales. The “ balaghans” 
in which the latter slumber away their existence, are dens, 
or burrows under ground dark with smoke, and exhibiting the 
consummation of poverty and wretchedness. The snow hut 
of the former is constructed with a degree of mechanical 
skill. The sides are built of blocks of hard snow cut in paral- 
lelograms, and so adjusted as to form a rotunda with an arch- 
ed roof. A circular hole in the side filled with a transparent 
piece of ice, serves for a window, and throws a mild light over 
the interior, like that seen through ground glass, Upon 
