440 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



to an elevated platform thvis made. In the winter, when the weather 

 permits, they net a ringed seal {Phoca foetida) under the ice, make 

 short inland trips, where they camp for weeks at a time in rude 

 snow-houses, hunting reindeer, which are shy though abiandant, 

 and they trap a few wolves and foxes. Every July and August 

 they expect the visit of a few whaling-vessels at least, and they are 

 seldom disappointed, for such craft are compelled by ice-floes to 

 hug this shore very closely, in order to get as far to the eastward 

 as the whales are found ; sometimes, in spite of all the wariness and 

 skill of our own hardy whalemen, great floe-booms, of icy make, 

 suddenly shut down on that land so quickly from the north as to 

 catch and crush the staunchest ships like egg-shells under foot. 

 Then, indeed, is the sadness and the distress of the white men 

 sharply contrasted with that great joy and happy anticipation of an 

 Innuit who feasts his eyes and gloats in fancy over the abandoned 

 vessels as they lie riven by ice upon those shallow strands of Icy 

 Cape or Point Barrow. 



It is more than sixty years now since Captain Beechey * camped 

 upon and located Point Barrow, our extreme limit of northern 

 landed possession, and in that time few changes, other than depop- 

 ulation of the natives, have taken place on this coast. That same 

 village of Noowuk, which he graphically described, still stands there 

 on the tip of a low gravel-spit which extends out from the mainland 

 twelve miles into the chill flood of an Arctic Ocean. All the land 

 at its extremity not inundated by the sea in storms is now, as it 

 was then, occupied by the winter houses of the natives. Blooming 

 here in the short summer of July, on those desolate moors adjacent 

 to Point Barrow, is the same dandelion and buttercup which filled 

 the Englishman then, as it does us now, with thoughts of meadows 

 at home, and some bright little poppies still nod their yellow heads 

 again to us, as they did to him, on this low north end of Alaska. 

 A tiny golden butterfly flits from flower to flower, and as they fade, 

 it, too, disappears over frost-bitten swales. 



Big ice-fields seldom ever fail to threaten the coast here, even 



* Captain F. W. Beechey H. M. S. Blossom, voyage 1825-28, inclusive. 

 The seasons of 1826 and 1827 were passed in these waters. Murdoch, who 

 passed the winters of 1881-83, inclusive, here, has given an interesting resume 

 of the natural history, etc., of the spot. Beechey's account of the people and 

 country are confirmed by him. 



