220 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
was, therefore, compelled to anchor in the open road off the 
village Nunamo. But even here extensive ice-fields, though 
thin and rotten, drifted about; and long, but narrow, belts -of 
ice passed the vessel in so large masses that it was not advisable 
to remain longer at the place. Our stay there was therefore 
confined to a few hours. 
During the course of the winter Lieutenant Nordquist en¬ 
deavoured to collect from the Chukches travelling past as 
complete information as possible regarding the Chukch villages 
or encampments which are found along the coast between 
Chaun Bay and Behring’s Straits. His informants always 
finished their list with the village Ertryn, situated west of 
Cape Deschnev, explaining that farther east and south there 
lived another tribe, with whom they indeed did not stand in 
open enmity, but who, however, were not to be fully depended 
upon, and to whose villages they therefore did not dare to 
accompany any of us.^ This statement also corresponds, as 
perhaps follows from what I have pointed out in the preceding 
chapter, with the accounts commonly found in books on the 
ethnography of this region. While we steamed forward 
cautiously in a dense fog in the neighbourhood of Cape 
Deschnev, twenty to thirty natives came rowing in a large 
skin boat to the vessel. Eager to make acquaintance with 
a tribe new to us, we received them with pleasure. But when 
they climbed over the side we found that they were pure 
1 The enmity appeared, however, to be of a very passive nature and by 
no means depending on any tribal dislike, but only arising from the inhab¬ 
itants of the villages lying farthest eastward being known to be of a 
quarrelsome disposition and having the same reputation for love of fight¬ 
ing as the peasant youths in some villages in Sweden. For Lieut. Hooper, 
who during the winter 1848-9 made a journey in dog-sledges from Chukot- 
skoj-nos along the coast towards Behring’s Straits says that the inhabitants 
at Cape Deschnev itself enjoyed the same bad reputation among their 
Namollo neighbours to the south as among the Chukches living to the 
westward. “ They spoke another language.” Possibly they were pure 
Eskimo. 
