OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 



527 



even necessary to except their task of cutting up the small seals, which is 

 in truth one of the greatest luxuries and privileges they enjoy ; and even if 

 it were esteemed a labour, it could scarcely be considered equivalent to that 

 of the women in many of our own fishing-towns, where the men's business is at 

 an end the moment the boat touches the beach. The most laborious of their 

 tasks occurs perhaps in making their various journeys, when all their goods 

 and chattels are to be removed at once, and when each individual must un- 

 doubtedly perform a full share of the general labour. The women are 

 however good walkers and not easily fatigued ; for we have several times 

 known a young woman of two and twenty, with a child in her hood, 

 walk twelve miles to the ships and back again the same day, for the sake of 

 a little bread-dust and a tin canister. When stationary in the winter, they 

 have really almost a sinecure of it, sitting quietly in their huts, and having 

 little or no employment for the greater part of the day. In short, there 

 are few, if any people, in this state of society among whom the women 

 are so well off. They always sit upon the beds with their legs doubled 

 under them*, and are uneasy in the posture usual with us. The men 

 sometimes sit as we do, but more generally with their legs crossed before 

 them. 



The women do not appear to be in general very prolific. Illumea indeed 

 had borne seven children, but no second instance of an equal number in one 

 family afterwards came to our knowledge ; three or four is about the usual 

 number. They are, according to their own account, in the habit of suckling 

 their children to the age of three years ; but we have seen a child of five 

 occasionally at the breast, though they are dismissed from the mother's hood 

 at about the former age. The time of weaning them must of course in some 

 instances depend on the mother's again becoming pregnant, and if this suc- 

 ceeds quickly it must, as Crantz relates of the Greenlanders f , go hard with 

 one of the infants. Nature, however, seems to be kind to them in this re- 

 spect, for we did not witness one instance, nor hear of any, in which a woman 

 was put to this inconvenience and distress. It is not uncommon to see one 

 woman suckling the child of another, while the latter happens to be em- 

 ployed in her other domestic occupations. They are in the habit also of 

 feeding their younger children from their own mouths, softening the food 

 by mastication, and then turning their heads round so that the infant in the 



* Crantz, I. 140. 



f Ibid. I. 162. 



