Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 359 



"Their (llie Greenlanders') houses resemble hulls of ships with 

 the keel uppermost; they are built of the ribs of whales and 

 are covered with moss and heather." At South Cape in Scoresby 

 Sound, Ryder found houses, in which ribs of whales were used in 

 the roof and vertebrae of whales in the passage^). Also in southern 

 West Greenland houses have been found built of whale-bone^). In 

 the northernmost districts at Smith Sound, Feilden states, that "on 

 the shores of Buchanan Strait we came upon deserted settlements 

 containing the ruins of many igloos; in one instance the ribs of a 

 large cetacean had been used as the rafters of a hut" ■^). Knud 

 Rasmussen stayed the night in an old house in Wolstenholme Sund, 

 in which the cross-beams in the roof were whale ribs^). The same 

 building material is met with more or less sporadically over the 

 whole of the Eskimo region westwards and probably everywhere as 

 a by-gone stage. I may just mention Frobisher's description of 

 houses "raised with stones and whale-bones and a skinne layd over 

 them" in Meta incognita (Baffin's Land)^), F. Boas' reference to the 

 houses of the Central Eskimo''), E. W. Nelson's description of a 

 whole Eskimo village on the point of East Cape, Siberia, consisting 

 of "dome-shaped" houses in which whale-ribs were used'), just as 

 in the dome-shaped Iglulik house north of Hudson Bay, and to John 

 Murdoch's description of the Eskimo house at Point Barrow, North 

 Alaska ®). The approximately round form of the West Eskimo whale- 

 rib houses is naturally determined by the material, the curved ribs 

 meeting each other over the top in the same way as tent-poles in 

 a tent. 



') Ryder (1895) p. 289. 



■') Grønlands historislie Mindesmærker III, p. 694 footnote 5. 



3) Nares, Narrative (1875) p. 188. 



*) Rasmussen (1906J p. 85. 



s) Frobisher (1577) pp. 225— 226 and 300: "Upon the maine land over against the 

 Countesses [of Warwicke] Hand we discovered and behelde to our great marvell 

 the poore caves and houses of those countrey people, whicli serve them (as it 

 should seeme) for their winter dwellings, and are made two fadome under 

 grounde, in compassé round, like to an oven, being joyned fast one by another, 



Iiaving holes like to a foxe or conny Ьеггз% to keepe and come togither 



From the ground upward they builde with wliales bones, for lacke of timber, 

 which bending one over another are handsomel3^ compacted in the top together, 

 and are covered over witli scales skinnes, which in stead of thiles, fence them 

 from the raine. In which house they have oni^^ one roome, having the one 

 hälfe of the floure raised with broad stones a foot higher than ye other, whereon 

 straAving mosse, they make their nests to sleep in". 



") F. Roas (1888) p. 548 ("the walls being formed of stones and whale-ribs"); 1901 

 pp. 76 and 401 (Southampton Island), 96 (Aivilik, Repulse Ray). 



') Nelson (1899) p. 257 (figs. 85 and 86) and p. 265. 



8) Murdoch (1892) p. 72, foot-note 2. 



