160 



THE POINT HARROW ESKIMO. 



as at Point Barrow. 1 Among the Eskimo of the central region they 

 are almost entirely unknown. The only mention I have seen of such 

 tools is in Parry s Second Voyage (p. 504), where he speaks of seeing at 

 Iglulik &quot; several open knives with crooked wooden handles,&quot; which he 

 thinks &quot;must have been obtained by communication alongshore with 

 Hudson Bay.&quot; I can find no specimen, figure, or description of the sa nat 

 (&quot;tool&quot;), the tool par excellence of the Greenlauders, except the follow 

 ing definition in Kleinschrnidt s .&quot;GiVulandsk Ordbog&quot;: &quot;2. Specially 

 a narrow, long-hafted knife, which is sharpened on one side and slightly 

 curved at the tip (and which is a Greeulander s chief tool).&quot; This seems 

 to indicate that this knife, so common in the West, is equally common 

 in Greenland. 2 



Whether these people used crooked knives before the introduction of 

 iron is by no means certain, though not improbable. Fig. Ilia, Xo. 

 89033 [11%], from Utkiavwlu, is a knife made by imbedding a flake of 

 gray flint in the lower edge of a haft of reindeer antler, of the proper 

 shape and curvature for a midllii handle. The haft is soiled and 



undoubtedly old, while 

 the flaked surfaces of the 

 flint do not seem fresh, 

 and the edge shows 

 slight nicks, as if it had been 

 used. Had this knife been fol 

 lowed by others equally genuine 

 looking, I should have no hes- 

 FIG. ii7. crooked knives, flint biaded. itation in pronouncing it a pre 



historic knife, and the ancestor of the present steel one. The fact, how 

 ever, that its purchase gave rise to the manufacture of a host of flint 

 knives all obviously new and more and more clumsily made, until we 

 refused to buy any more, leads me to suspect that it was fabricated 

 with very great care from old material, and skillfully soiledby the maker. 

 Ten of these knives of flint were purchased within a fortnight before 

 we detected the deceit. Fig. 1176, No. 8!)636 [1212] is one of the 

 best of these counterfeits, made by wedging a freshly flaked flint blade 

 into the haft of an old savigron, which has been somewhat trimmed to 

 receive the blade and soiled and charred to make it look old. Other 

 more carelessly made ones had clumsily carved handles of whale s bone, 

 with roughly flaked flints stuck into them and glued in with oil dregs. 

 All of these came from Utkiavwlu. Another suspicious circumstance 

 is that a few days previously two slate-bladed crooked knives had been 

 brought down from Nuwttk and accepted without question as ancient. 

 On examining the specimens since our return, I find that while the 

 hafts are certainly old, the blades, which are of soft slate easily worked, 



Lisiansky also mentions &quot;a small crooked knife&quot; (Voyage, p. 181), as one of the tools used in Ka- 

 diak in 1805. 



A specimen lias lately been received at the National Museum. It i* remarkably like the Indian 

 knife in pattern. 



