138 THE SEA. 



any part of it, though hundreds of miles from land.* Plover Bay does not derive its- 

 name from the whaling- which is often pursued in its waters, although an ingenious 

 Dutchman, of the service in which the writer was engaged at the periods of his visits, 

 persisted in calling it "Blubber" Bay; its name is due to the visit of H.M.S. Plover 

 in 1848-9, when engaged in the search for Sir John Franklin. The bay is a most secure 

 haven, sheltered at the ocean end by a long spit, and walled in on three sides by rugged 

 mountains and bare cliffs, the former composed of an infinite number of fragments of 

 rock, split up by the action of frost. Besides many coloured lichens and mosses, there 

 is hardly a sign of vegetation, except at one patch of country near a small inner harbour, 

 where domesticated reindeer graze. On the spit before mentioned is a village of Tchuktchi 

 natives; their tents are composed of hide, walrus, seal, or reindeer, with here and there 

 a piece of old sail-cloth, obtained from the whalers, the whole patchwork covering a 

 framework formed of the large bones of whales and walrus. The remains of underground 

 houses are seen, but the people who used them have passed away. The present race makes 

 no use of such houses. Their canoes are of skin, covering sometimes a wooden and 

 sometimes a bone frame. On either side of one of these craft, which is identical with 

 the Greenland "oomiak," or women's boat, it is usual to have a sealskin blown out tight, 

 and the ends fastened to the gunwale; these serve as floats to steady the canoe. They 

 often carry sail, and proceed safely far out to sea, even crossing Bering Straits to the 

 American side. The natives are a hardy race; the writer has seen one of them carry 

 the awkward burden of a carpenter's chest, weighing two hundred pounds, without 

 apparent exertion. One of their principal men was of considerable service to the 

 expedition and to a party of telegraph constructors, who were left there in a wooden 

 house made in San Francisco, and erected in a few days in this barren spot. This native, 

 by name Naukum, was taken down into the engine-room of the telegraph steamer 

 G. S. Wright. He looked round carefully and thoughtfully, and then, shaking his head, 

 said, solemnly, " Too muchee wheel ; makee man too muchee think ! " His curiosity 

 on board was unappeasable. " What's that fellow ? " was his query with regard to 

 anything, from the donkey-engine to the hencoops. Colonel Bulkley gave him a suit of 

 mock uniform, gorgeous with buttons. One of the men remarked to him, " Why,. 

 Naukum, you'll be a king soon ! " But this magnificent prospect did not seem, judging 

 from the way he received it, to be much to his taste. This man had been some- 

 times entrusted with as much as five barrels of villainous whisky for trading purposes, and 

 he had always accounted satisfactorily to the trader for its use. The whisky sold to the 

 natives is of the most horrible kind, scarcely superior to "coal oil" or paraffine. They 

 appeared to understand the telegraph scheme in a general way. One explaining it, said, 

 " S'pose lope fixy, well ; one Melican man Plower Bay, make talky all same San Flancisco 

 Melican." Perhaps quite as lucid an explanation as you could get from an agricultural 

 labourer or a street arab at home. 



Colonel Bulkley, at his second visit to Plover Bay, caused a small house of planks 



* Captain Scammon, detailed from the United States Revenue Service, to take the post of Chief of Marine 

 in the telegraph expedition on which the writer served, made a series of soundings. For nearly two degrees (between 

 latitudes 64 and 66 N.) the average depth is under 19^ fathoms. 



