458 



ivory handle and the bone handle is slanting, while in another 

 specimen the ivory extends some distance along the bone 

 handle to which it is sewed". It is really a slanting joint 

 of this kind we find here in inv. Amd. 79, where the blade 

 is of iron and the handle of wood. The two parts form an 

 angle towards each other. The type is the well-known Eskimo 

 crooked knife ^), and as for the joining of the two parts, it is, 

 at any rate, just as genuine Eskimo as the knives of the same 

 type known in Alaska^), with a handle now of bone and now 

 of wood. 



Now as for the iron, both knives and harpoons heads with 

 iron blades have been previously found in North East Green- 

 land (cf. also inv. Amd. 3 and 77). So early an explorer as 

 Scoresby^) found at 70° ЗГ at Cape Swainson (near Cape Lister) 

 'the head of an arrow or small dart, rather neatly made of 

 bone, armed with a small piece of iron', and adds that "it is 

 difficult to say whether this iron was native, or whether it 

 was carried on shore in the timbers of some wreck". The 

 manufacture was a good deal similar to that of the iron imple- 

 ments of the Arctic Highlanders, discovered by Captain Ross. 

 The state and situation in which it was found, indicated that 

 it had not long been out of use". It was found in a pool of 

 water down by the shore and was hardly at all rusty. Clav- 

 ering*), who in the following year came across the Eskimo 

 themselves in these regions, also observed that several of their 

 weapons had iron points which "seemed to be of meteoric 

 origin." "Die zweite Deutsche Nordpolarexpedition" ^) found in 

 Klein-Pendulum Island a knife (or chisel) of iron with a wooden 

 handle ; the iron blade is inserted in a slit at one end and 



1) Murdoch I, 157-161; Boas II, 87, fig. 126. 



'■') Murfloch I, fig. 118; Nelson 85—86, PI. 38, figs. 19 to 31 



3) Scoresby 187. 



■•l Quoted in Petermann's Mitteilungen 1870, p. 326. 



6) Koldewcy 605, fig. 20; and 623. 



I 



