IMPLEMENTS OF THE CHASE— ABSENCE OF CANOES. 181 



of their craft. Their weapons are a lance of narwhal ivory, or 

 sometimes of two hear thigh-hones lashed together, tipped with 

 steel since their intercourse with whalers, and a harpoon. They 

 also have a knife made from some old drifted cask hoop, which 

 they conceal in the boot. The lance is used in their gallant en- 

 counters with hears, and in securing a walrus or seal on the ice, 

 when its retreat has been cut off ; the harpoon for the far more 

 dangerous battles with the walrus in his own element. They 

 have bird-nets, with which they catch the little auks and guil- 

 lemots that breed in myriads on the perpendicular crags; and 

 this employment is also attended with great risk. In the year 

 we visited Cape York, a native told us that several men had lost 

 their lives in netting guillemots on the steep cliffs of Akpa Island. 

 York also told us that his people occasionally, but very rarely, 

 succeeded in killing a reindeer ; and Petersen says that the twenty 

 decayed skulls, without lower jaws, that were found in the north- 

 ward of 79° N., had been killed by native hunters. 1 



They have no canoes, either kayak or umiak, and are thus con- 

 fined to the land and ice; and they probably first obtained the 

 word umiak for a ship, from John Sackheuse when he pointed 

 to the Alexander and Isabella. This ignorance of an appliance 

 which is known to nearly all the Eskimo tribes is remarkable. 

 The Arctic Highlanders certainly do not show themselves to be 

 less intelligent than other Eskimo tribes in contrivances for pro- 

 curing food and providing for their comfort. I am inclined, there- 

 fore, to account for their want of kayaks from the circumstances of 

 their position. In the south, from the absence of ice during a great 

 part of the year, the Greenlander is obliged to seek his food on 

 the sea; while in the north there is a land-floe throughout the 

 year, and the Arctic Highlander can harpoon the walrus, narwhal, 

 and white whale from the ice.. The necessity which led to the 

 invention of a kayak in the one case, does not exist, in so urgent 

 a form, in the other. Hans, the Holsteinborg Eskimo, who was 

 left behind by Dr. Kane (having fallen in love with a fair 

 daughter of the far north), had a kayak with him; hut in the 

 winter of 1857-58, being pressed by famine, he and his family 

 were obliged to eat it. 



It is more remarkable that the Arctic Highlanders have no 

 bows and arrows, and this is one of the circumstances which con- 

 clusively prove that they are not the same people as the Eskimo 

 of Boothia and Pond's Bay. The great superiority of the sledges 



. . 16 



o 2 



