Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 1.djvu/342

Rh vicinity where the kodlunas landed, thought the balls were soft stones. They supposed the whites had come from ships that had been lost or wrecked in the ice. "When these whites left the land they went farther down toward the big sea.

"The whites had arrived at Karmowong in the fall of the year, one day when the weather was very bad, wind blowing very hard, and snowing fast. It was very cold too. "The Karmowong Innuits thought the whites had obtained their tuktoo furs of the Sekoselar men. The skins had on the winter coat of the tuktoo. None of the kodlunas died there. They all went away in boats, and the Innuits never saw or heard of them more." From further questions that I put, and which were readily answered, I concluded in my own mind that the kodlunas must have been at Karmowong in the fall of 1858, and the way the Sekoselar Innuits heard of it was by a native man who had seen the whites and the two boats. Now, upon receiving this information, I at length came to the conclusion that it referred to some of Franklin's lost crews. Two boats of white men going toward the great sea, and apparently subsisting upon Innuit food, with reindeer skins for wrappers, and other such material, would seem to indicate that a few of the long-lost voyagers had at last made their way from King William's Land and Boothia toward the goal of their ultimate deliverance. The experience I had already gained of Esquimaux life proved to me what white men could endure under the exigency of circumstances. There was myself—not reduced to any such absolute necessity as the poor English voyagers undoubtedly must have been—yet capable of sustaining and even of enjoying life among the natives. How much more so, then, the unfortunate men of Franklin's wrecked ships? To me the matter seemed conclusive, although I could not give implicit confidence to what I had heard until personally testing the truth by examination.

On my return to the States, however, I find that the whole story must have had reference to the loss of a British vessel