416 W, Thalbitzer 



here downwards the shaft becomes more and more flat to fit the flat throw- 

 ing stick, which in this harpoon is used farthest back on the shaft. Towards 

 the base the section of the shaft again becomes rectangular so that the flat, 

 inner side of the bone feathers may lie firmly against the narrow sides; 

 they are here pinned fast by wooden pegs. The outer sides of the feathers 

 are convex, resembling the back of a seal, and behind (lowermost) they are 

 carved into the seal-tail ornament. 



The general or most obvious difference between the East and 

 West Greenland harpoons lies in this (according to Johan Petersen), 

 that the loose bone shaft at Ammassalik is longer and more slender 

 than on the west coast, where it is comparatively short. The same 

 applies to the blade of the toggle head (iron or bone) which is 

 longer in Ammassalik than on the West Greenland harpoon. 



When bone was scarce in earlier times, the loose shaft of the 

 harpoon was made up partly of wood, partly of bone; for example, 

 the middle would be of wood, the point and butt end of bone. For 

 want of larger bones also two smaller, cylindrical pieces of bone 

 could be spliced together to form the shaft. In Amdrup's collection 

 there are several loose shafts of harpoons, which are made in this 

 manner; each part has an oblong bevelling, which fits on to the 

 other's and the overlapping parts are spliced together by iron nails 

 (fig. 119 a). In my earlier description of Amdrup's finds from north- 

 ern East Greenland I identified two cylindrical bone points from 

 Cape Tobin as "miniature bone fore-pieces of whaling harpoons"^). 

 It seems more correct to regard these as fragments of ordinary loose 

 shafts, intended to be spliced together with thicker (lower) parts of 

 the shaft, which are wanting. They should thus be called "frag- 

 mentary fore-pieces or loose shafts for harpoons". These spliced 

 bone shafts are extremely common at Ammassalik. — Further, the 

 "feathers" of the feather harpoon might be made of wood with tips 

 of bone or ivory. As the seal-hunting in earlier times (before the 

 introduction of the rifle) was exclusively carried on by means of 

 harpoons, much bone was lost and the bone parts had to be constantly 

 renewed or replaced. 



The different use of the knob-harpoon and the feather harpoon, 

 even within the same district, is explained by Fabricius as an 

 economic question, arising from the difficulty of obtaining a good 

 piece of bone or sufficient bone for the feathers^). According to his 

 description, namely, only a bone ring is used in the knob-harpoons 

 in West Greenland, at the end of which a round bone knob is mor- 

 tised, thus only a very small piece of bone (ivory). I have no informa- 

 tion as to whether this feature is typical for older harpoons of this 



') Thalbitzer (1909) p. 371, fig. 9> -^ (Amdrup coll. Nos. 18-19). 

 -) Fabricius (181()j p. 142. 



