Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/343

] inches in circumference, with a strong bone head, thirteen inches long, quite straight, and tapered to a fine point: the bone head, which was fitted into a socket at the heavier end of the spear, was secured by a strong seal skin thong, about a foot from each end of the spear, and used only for the destruction of the largest kind of seals. The bone head, when struck into the animal, trips out of the socket and acts as a toggle, whilst the released staff performs the part of a buoy.

Another spear, longer and lighter than the above, stained with red ochre, and armed with a barbed bone head, finely pointed, but without any seal skin thong attached, was probably employed against the smaller kinds of seals, or perhaps in warlike meetings, for the first party we met had spears of this nature concealed in the wood.

The third kind of spear was hardly five feet long, and proportion ably slender, armed with a bone head with seventeen notches, increasing in size from the point to the heel, securely fixed to the spear by a lashing of seal skin, and probably used for killing birds.

In one of the canoes that came alongside the ship, we observed three arrows of very rude make, pointed with obsidian, which they were unwilling to part with, and the bow they kept carefully concealed. In the same canoe was a white dog, which they were so much afraid of losing that I could not prevail upon them to let me see it. This party were strangers; and, on landing at the head of the