160 THE POINT BARROW ESKIMO. 
as at Point Barrow.' 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 
Tglulik ‘+ several open knives with crooked wooden handles,” which he 
thinks “must have been obtained by communication alongshore with 
Hudson Bay.” I can find no specimen, figure, or description of the sa‘nat 
(“tool”), the tool par excellence of the Greenlanders, except the follow- 
ing definition in Kleinsehmidt’s “Grénlandsk Ordbog”: “2. Specially 
a narrow, long-hafted knife, which is sharpened on one side and slightly 
curved at the tip (and which is a Greenlander’s chief tool).” This seems 
to indicate that this knife, so common in the West, is equally common 
in Greenland.’ 
Whether these people used crooked kntves before the introduction of 
iron is by no means certain, though not improbable. Fig. 117a, No. 
89633 [1196], from Utkiavwii, 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 midlin handle. The haft is soiled and 
undoubtedly old, while 
the flaked surfaces ofthe 
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. 117.—Crooked knives, flint bladed. itation in pronouncing it a pre- 
historic knife, and the ancestor of the present steelone. 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 soiled by the maker. 
Ten of these knives of flint were purchased within a fortnight before 
we detected the deceit. Fig. 117), No. 89636 [1212] is one of the 
best of these counterfeits, made by wedging a freshly flaked flint blade 
into the haft of an old savigrén, 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 Utkiavwit. Another suspicious circumstance 
is that a few days previously two slate-bladed crooked knives had been 
brought down from Nuwittk 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 ‘‘a small crooked knife” (Voyage, p. 181), as one of the tools used in Ka- 
diak in 1805. 
2A specimen has lately been received at the National Museum. It is remarkably like the Indian 
knife in pattern 
