OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 



503 



Wager River by the name of .Ootkobseek-salifc,* we were at first led to conjecture 

 that they procured their pots, or the material for making them, in that neigh- 

 bourhood : this, however, they assured us was not the case, the Avhole of 

 them coming from Akkoolee, where the stone is found in very high situations. 

 One of the women at Winter Island, who came from that country, said that 

 her parents were much employed in making these pots, chiefly it seems as 

 articles of barter. The asbestos which they use in the shape of a roundish 

 pointed stick, called tatko, for trimming the lamps, is met with about Repulse 

 Bay, and generally as they said on low land. 



Resides the ootkooseeks, they have circular and oval vessels of whalebone 

 of various sizes which, as well as their ivory knives made out of a walrus* 

 tusk, (16.) are precisely similar to those described on the western coast of Baf- 

 fin's Bay in 1820 f , They have also a number of smaller vessels of skin sewed 

 neatly together ; and a large basket of the same material, resembling a com- 

 mon sieve in shape, but with the bottom close and tight, is to be seen in 

 every apartment. Under every lamp stands a sort of " save-all," consisting 

 of a small skin basket for catching the oil that falls over. Almost every 

 family was in possession of a wooden tray very much resembling those used 

 to carry butchers' meat in England, and of nearly the same dimensions, which 

 we understood them to have procured by way of Noowook. They had a 

 number of the bowls or cups already once or twice alluded to as being 

 made out of the thick root of the horn of the musk-ox. (26.) Of the 

 smaller part of the same horn they also form a convenient drinking-cup, (9.) 

 sometimes turning it up artificially about one-third from the point, so as to 

 be almost parallel to the other part, and cutting it full of small notches as a 

 convenience in grasping it. (8.) These or any other vessel for drinking they 

 call Immoochiuk. 



Besides the ivory knives, the men were well supplied with a much more 

 serviceable kind, made of iron, and called panna. (14.) The form of this knife 

 is very peculiar, being seven inches long, two and a quarter broad, quite 

 straight and flat, pointed at the end, and ground equally sharp at both edges ; 

 this is firmly secured into a handle of bone or wood, above a foot long, by- 

 two or three iron rivets. This formidable looking weapon, of which Cap- 



* It will be seen by the chart that the Esquimaux gave us information of an arm of the 

 sea lying opposite to Wager River, on the Northern Coast of Ameriea, which tney also dis- 

 tinguish by the same name, and which is only one or two days' journey distant from the other, 

 f Journal of the Voyage of 1819-20, p. 286. 



