Ethnographical collections from East Greenland. 403 



Of the WHALE FISHING ill earlier times Kilime gave me an 

 account. The men, who went out in the umiaks, were clad in water- 

 tight skin anoraks {qaarseP'aat), which were tied tightly round 

 about and then blown up, so as to bear them up in the water like 

 bladders, if the whale should upset the umiak. They attacked this 

 with their lances or with tent-poles on which knives were fixed. 

 The umiak crept close up to the whale. Six sealskin floats (arper- 

 seetin) of unusual size (the largest made from the harbour seal) were 

 attached to it and when dead it was towed to land and divided up 

 with knives and ulos ^). (Cf. pp. 31 and 56). 



Bears (cf. pp. 52 — 53) are chiefly attacked with the lance, whe- 

 ther from the kaiak, sledge or on the ice. They are often attacked 

 in a very venturesome manner. A man feels it an honour to have 

 scars of wounds on his body from the claws of a bear. He thinks 

 nothing of getting out of his kaiak on to the ice-hummock, where 

 the bear has gone, and attacking it singly with his two-edged knife 

 (pana). Many of those who come well out of such a doubtful 

 combat, owe their life to the assistance of a comrade who in the 

 moment of need hastened to the man threatened with death and 

 rescued him from the hug or teeth of the beast. 



Bears are met with both in summer and in winter. They come 

 as a rule from the south along the land^), either out on the sea 

 ice, where regular bear paths are formed, the animals following in 

 each other's tracks, or through the fjords, over the cliffs. The winter 

 hunt is carried on from the sledge with dogs and often lasts several 

 days on end. The .team of dogs is specially trained for the bear 

 hunting. The lance (awalisaq) used in attacking the bear hangs in 

 two loops on the left side of the sledge. The dogs are quickly let 

 loose, when the hunter following up the tracks has overtaken the 



'^) In the tale about Natatek (pp. 246 — 250) a special weapon (angmaletarsiutek) is 

 mentioned in connection with the narwhal hunting, presumably at openings in 

 the ice. But no further information is available. — Glahn in 1784 wrote a 

 report on the customs of the Greenlanders in whale fishing. It appears from 

 this, that the hunting of the large whales (or rather only of Balaena vera, 

 Zordragerii) was only carried on in the Holstensborg district (W. Greenland 

 ca. 66°lat. N.); 2 to 3 umiaks went out ' together, each with 10 to 12 men on- 

 board. Further, many kaiaks accompanied them, acting like the "flying-column 

 of an army", or in modern language, like torpedo-boats in a fleet. 



-) If a man finds a bear track out on the sea ice, he looks southwards for the 

 next bear that may follow. The reason why the bears are almost always going 

 northwards, when they are encountered at Ammassalik, is said to be, that they 

 move southwards in large numbers out at the ice-edge, many miles from the 

 coast, where the men never go out. From the south point of the land they 

 then turn northwards along the coast. 



26* 



