MAMMALS. 293 



While cruising along the coast these posts usually gave us the first notice of a native camp, 

 and when we drew near we usually found some one occupying the perch. 



The Eskimo of Saint La,wrence Island and the islands and coasts of Bering Straits are hold 



whale-hunters, and are sometimes employed for the season on the whaling-ships. One sturdy 



young fellow from the Siberian shore had gone to San Francisco with a vessel and remained 



• all winter. He liked the country there, he said ; but, as he expressed it, " 'Merican too damn much 



work." So he returned to his squalid hut on the shore of Plover Bay. 



The Bowhead, and some other marine mammals, undoubtedly pass from the Greenland 

 coast to Bering Straits and vice versa. From an Eskimo on the coast of Kotzebue Sound we 

 obtained a harpoon bearing an English stamp. This weapon was taken from a whale captured 

 by the Eskimo on the shore of Kotzebue Sound in the fall of 1880. This harpoon was shown to 

 every whaling captain we met during the summer, and, without exception, they were emphatic in 

 the statement that no such iron was ever used by any vessel in this part of the Arctic Ocean, but 

 that it was a common pattern with the English whalers on the Greenland coast. As each whaler 

 has a private mark on his irons, which all of the other whalers working in the same region 

 know, there is no doubt that the captains were right, and that the iron in question had been 

 brought from Greenland, in the body of the whale, by way of the Northwest Passage. Another 

 fact, which is in direct confirmation of the idea that whales pass from Bering Sea to the Greenland 

 coast and back, is that a year when whales are scarce in the Greenland seas they are numerous 

 about Bering Straits, and vice versa. 



