LONELY NORTHERN WASTES. 431 



Ignalook ; while that high isolated hay-cock mass, about seven miles 

 south of Kroozenstero, is called Fairway Rock. Bering Straits has 

 an average depth of only twenty-six fathoms, with a hard, regular 

 bottom of sand, gravel, and silt. 



This gateway to the Arctic Ocean is closed by ice-floes usually 

 by the middle or end of October every year, and opened again in 

 the following season by May 25th or June 1st, but the ice-fields 

 do not allow much room for navigation north until the middle or 

 end of June, sometimes not until the month of July has been well 



On that low, northern tundra slope of Cape Prince of Wales is 

 the largest Innuit village in the Alaskan northland. Four hundred 

 souls live there in a settlement which they style Kingigahmoot, and 

 they bear unmistakable evidence of the vicious and degrading in- 

 fluence which evil whalers and rum-traders have exerted. We are 

 struck by their saucy flippancy, their restless, meddlesome, and im- 

 pertinent bearing. It is because these people have been for a great 

 many years thoroughly familiarized with and degraded by all the 

 tricks and petty treacheries of dishonest and disreputable white 

 men. They do not draw a line in favor of any decency in our race 

 to-day, and hence their disagreeable manner. Otherwise, beyond 

 shaving the crowns of their heads, they do not differ from the 

 Innuits whom we have met heretofore. They are seamen in the 

 full sense of the word hardy, reckless navigators who boldly 

 launch themselves into stormy waters and cross from land to land 

 in tempest and in fogs, depending solely upon the frail support of 

 their walrus-skin baidars, or oomiaks. These are very neatly made, 

 however, the covering of seal- and walrus-hides being stretched and 

 sewed tightly over wooden frames that are lashed at the joints with 

 sinew and whalebone-thongs. They hoist a square sail of deer- 

 skins or cotton drilling, and run before the wind in heavy gales ; or 

 they employ paddles and oars, and urge their craft against head- 

 winds and perverse currents. Their poverty is the only redemption 

 which they have had from absolute destruction ; for were they pos- 

 sessed of furs that would encourage the regular visits of traders, 

 they would, with their disposition to debauchery, have been utterly 

 exterminated long before this time. But they are poor, very poor, 

 having nothing to tempt the cupidity of white traders nothing but 

 small stores of walrus-oil and teeth, and a few red and white foxes, 

 perhaps. Therefore our people never stop long near them, just 



