OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 



393 



wonders before evening, and our medical men gave me great hopes. As an 1823 - 

 introduction to a system of cleanliness, and preparatory to washing the sick 

 who were in a most filthy state, I scrubbed Shega and her father from head 

 to foot and dressed them in new clothes. During the night I persuaded 

 both mother and child, who were very restless and constantly moaning, to 

 take a few spoonfuls of soup. On the morning of the 24th the woman ap- 24, 

 peared considerably improved, and she both spoke and ate a little. As she 

 was covered with so thick a coating of dirt that it could be taken off in 

 scales, I obtained her assent to wash her face and hands a little before noon. 

 The man and his daughter now came to my table to look at some things I 

 had laid out to amuse them ; and after a few minutes Shega lifted the curtain 

 to look at her mother, when she again let it fall and tremblingly told us she 

 was dead. 



" The husband sighed heavily, the daughter burst into tears, and the poor 

 little infant made the moment more distressing by calling in a plaintive tone 

 on its mother, by whose side it was lying. I determined on burying the 

 woman on shore, and the husband was much pleased at my promising that 

 the body should be drawn on a sledge by men instead of dogs ; for to our 

 horror Takkelikkeeta had told me that dogs had eaten part of Keimooseuk, 

 and that when he left the huts with his wife one was devouring the body as 

 he passed it. 



" Takkeelikkeeta now prepared to dress the dead body, and in the first 

 place stopped his nose with deer's hair and put on his gloves, seeming 

 unwilling that his naked hand should come in contact with the corpse. I 

 observed in this occupation his care that every article of dress should be 

 as carefully placed as when his wife was living, and having drawn the boots 

 on the wrong legs, he pulled them off again and put them properly ; this cere- 

 mony finished, the deceased was sewed up in a hammock, and at the hus- 

 band's urgent request her face was left uncovered. An officer who was 

 present at the time agreed with me in fancying that the man, from his words 

 and actions, intimated a wish that the living child might be enclosed with 

 its mother. We may have been mistaken, but there is an equal probability 

 that we were right in our conjecture ; for according to Crantz and Egede 

 the Greenlanders were in the habit of burying their motherless infants from 

 a persuasion that they must otherwise starve to death, and also from being 

 unable to bear the cries of tjie little ones while lingering for several days 

 without sustenance ; for no woman will give them any share of their milk; 



3 E 



