364 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
racter of a wife; and where is the bride elect, who is not de¬ 
sirous of bedizening her person to the best advantage, with the 
fond expectation of finding greater grace and favor in the eyes of 
her accepted lord ? If a transaction of this kind had taken place, 
in which two European women were the actresses, the right of 
proprietorship would have been strongly contested, and perhaps 
an appeal to the gentlemen of the coif resorted to, in order to de¬ 
termine the exact position of the meum and tuum of the business; 
happily however for the Esquimaux people, they were not yet so 
far advanced in civilization, as to suffer, under a worse than an 
Egyptian plague, in the swarm of lawyers, for whose unhallowed 
gains, the happiness of the people of England is sacrificed, and 
therefore they proceeded to settle the business in a friendly 
way, as they seated themselves under the lee of a hillock of 
snow ; the result of which was, that the hooks and needles 
should be the property of the wife of the son of Illictu, who 
had been the instrument of the restoration of the dog, and the 
string of beads, the inalienable property of Terrekewona, the 
intended spouse of Nutckeuknawhook . 
During the latter part of the month of March, the weather 
was beautifully serene, of which Commander Ross took the ad¬ 
vantage in order to prosecute his observations, relative to some of 
the scientific objects, connected with the expedition, and the 
result of which will be found in the appendix to this work. 
Scarcely a day elapsed, that the ship was not visited by a 
party of the Esquimaux, who appeared actually determined 
to exhaust their stock of clothing, in exchange for some tri- 
vial things, which were tossing about in various parts o 
the ship as mere lumber, and the value of which intrinsically 
was of no consideration. It must, however, be admitted on 
the other hand, that some of the articles, which they were 
in the daily habit of bringing to the ship, were in them¬ 
selves of trifling worth—a pair of mittens was a rude adapt¬ 
ation of two pieces of seal skin, sewed together in the most 
bungling manner, and which were found to be excessively in¬ 
convenient to the sailors, on account of their not being any 
separation for the fingers, which rendered them almost wholly 
useless in any operations which they had to perform on board 
