146 Polar Explorations. 



they have consumed or driven away the seals and walruses, 

 when ihey remove to some other part of the ice, in sledjies 

 drawn by wolf dogs, where they stay until compelled by the 

 same cause to seek another station. In summer they obtain 

 fish, rein deer, and a few birds. They sometimes eat their food 

 without cooking, but when not rendered voracious by abstin- 

 ence, they boil it m a pot made by hollowing out a stone. This 

 is suspended by thqngs cut from seal or deer skin attached to 

 a cross bar made of the ribs of animals, over a lamp, which 

 is also scooped out of a stone — filled with seal oil, and light- 

 ed by a wick of dry moss rubbed soft between their hands. 

 They procure fire by striking pieces of iron pyrites agamst 

 each other, over a plat of rubbed moss. Their dress made of 

 the skin of the rein deer with the fur inside, effectually se- 

 cures them from the rigors of the climate. When they go 

 out, another entire suit with the fur outside is put over all, 

 and a pair of water tight seal skin moccasins, with similar 

 mittens for their hands. A large deep hood serves the dou- 

 ble purpose of covering the head, and carrying the children. 

 The Esquimaux seen by Capt. Franklin, on the McKenzie, 

 were hostile and quarrelsome ; traits acquired from the neigh- 

 boring Indians, who are always at war with them for the 

 means of subsistence. Those near Hudson's strait are more 

 depraved than any seen on this continent, their capacity for 

 mischief and crime, having been rapidly developed by their 

 intercourse with traders and others. 



The Greenland Esquimaux treat their women with more se- 

 verity — the Samoieds are more dull, and the Kamschatdales, 

 if possible, more brutish than any other tribes of the arctic 

 savages, but the similarity which otherwise prevails among 

 them, appears to spring from the sameness of their avoca- 

 tions — the dreariness of their country, and the hardships 

 which benumb their faculties. 



The huts of the Esquimaux are superior in ingenuity and 

 neatness to those of the Kamschatdales. The " balaghans" 

 in which the latter slumber away their existence, are dens, 

 or burrows under ground dark with smoke, and exhibiting the 

 consummation of poverty and wretchedness. The snow hut 

 of the former is constructed with a degree of mechanical 

 skill. The sides are built of blocks of hard snow cut in paral- 

 lelograms, and so adjusted as to form a rotunda with an arch- 

 ed roof. A circular hole in the side filled with a transparent 

 piece of ice, serves for a window, and throws a mild light over 

 the interior, like that seen through ground glass. Unon 



