222 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
the Chukches, or perhaps merely Eskimo who had been 
paying a friendly visit to the Chukches and who had taken 
part as volunteers in their war of freedom. It therefore 
appears to me to be on the whole more probable that the 
Eskimo have migrated from America to Asia, than that, as 
some authors have supposed, this tribe has entered America 
from the west by Behring’s Straits or Wrangel Land. 
The tent-village Nunamo, or, as Hooper writes, “ Noonah- 
mone,” does not lie low, like the Chukch villages we had 
formerly seen, on the sea-shore, but pretty high up on g. 
cape between the sea and a river which debouches immediately 
to the south-west of the village, and now during the snow¬ 
melting season was much flooded. At a short distance from 
the coast the land was occupied by a very high chain of 
mountains, which was split up into a number of summits and 
whose sides were formed of immense stone mounds distributed 
in terraces. Here a large number of marmots and lagomys 
had their haunt. The lagomys, a species of rodent that 
does not occur in Sweden, of the size of a large rat, is remark¬ 
able for the care with which in summer it collects great stores 
for the winter. The village consisted of ten tents built without 
order on the first high strand bank. The tents differed some¬ 
what in construction from the common Chukch tents, and as 
drift-wood appears to be met with on the beach only in limited 
quantity, whale-bones had been used on a very large scale in 
the frame of the tent. Thus, for instance, the tent-covering 
of seal-skin was stretched downwards over the ribs or lower 
jawbones of the whale which were fixed in the ground like 
poles. These were united above with slips of whale-bones, 
from which other slips of the same sort of bones or of whale¬ 
bone rose to the summit of the tent, and finally, to prevent 
the blast from raising the tent-covering from the ground, its 
border was loaded with masses of large heavy bones. Eleven 
shoulder-blades of the whale were thus used round a single 
