MURDOCH. ] UMIAKS. 339 
loops of thong as in the diagram Fig. 344. To keep the oar from chaf- 
ing the skin on the gunwale, they lash to the latter a long plate of 
bone. No, 89696 [1197] from Utkiavwin is one of these plates. Two 
of these oars are commonly used in an umiak, one forward and one aft, 
and the women row with great vigor, swinging well from the hips, but 
do not keep stroke. The use of oars is So unusual among savages that 
it would be natural to suppose that these people had adopted the cus- 
tom from the whites. If this be the case, the custom reached them 
long ago, and through very indirect channels. 
When Thomas Simpson, in 1837, bought an umiak from some Point 
Barrow natives at Dease Inlet, he bought with it ‘‘ four of their slender 
oars, which they used as tent poles, besides a couple of paddles; fitted 
the oars with lashings, and arranged our strange vessel so well that the 
ladies were in raptures, declaring us to be genuine Esquimaux, and not 
poor white men.”! The custom, 
moreover, appears to be wide- 
spread since Lyon speaks of see- 
ing in 1821, “two very clumsy 
oars with flat blades, pulled by 
women,” in the umiaks at Hud- 
son Strait.2 It was practiced at 
a still earlier date in Greenland.® 
While at Point Barrow the oars have very narrow blades and the 
double paddles very broad ones, the reverse seemed to be the case in 
Greenland, where the double paddle, as already noticed, has blades not 
over 3 or 4 inches broad. Crantz describes the oars as “ short and 
broad before, pretty much like a shovel, but only longer, and * * 
confined to their places on the gunnel with a strap of seal’s leather.” 
(Vol. 2, p. 149 and pl. vr) Although both oars and sails are un- 
doubtedly quite ancient inventions (Frobisher in his description of Meta 
Incognita in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589) pp. 621 and 628, speaks of skin 
boats with sails of entrail),‘ I am strongly inclined to believe that they 
are both considerably more recent than the paddles, not only on general 
principles, but from the fact that the whaling umiaks ‘t Point Barrow 
use only paddles. There is no practical reason agaimt using either 
oars or Sails, and in fact the latter would often be of great advantage 
in silently approaching a whale, as the American whalemen have long 
Fic, 344.—Method of slinging the oar of umiak. 
1 Narrative, p. 148. 
? Journal, p. 30. Compare also Chappell, ‘‘ Hudson Bay,” p. 57. 
3See Egede, Greenland, p. 111. 
4These passages being, as far as I know. the earliest description of the umiak and kaiak are worth 
quotation: * Their boats are made all of Seale skins, with a keel of wood within the skinne; the 
proportion of them is like a Spanish shallop, sane only they be flat in the bottome, and sharp at both 
endes ™ (p. 621, 1576). Again: ‘‘They haue two sorts of boats made of leather, set out on the inner 
side with quarters of wood, artificially tyed with thongs of the same; the greater sort are not much 
unlike our wherries, wherein sixteene or twenty men may sitte; they have for a sayle, drest the 
guttes of such beasts as they kill, very fine and thinne, which they sewe together; the other boate is 
but for one man to sitte and rowe in, with one oare”’ (p. 628, 1577). 
