Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/701

Rh middle where the man gets in and sits with his legs under the forward deck.

All the Eskimos, except perhaps some of them who live in the wooded regions of southeastern Alaska, who are said to use birch bark canoes like the Indians, cover their boats with the skins of marine animals, using the skins of the larger seals for the umiak, and those of the small seals for the kayak.

It is no small undertaking for a man at Point Barrow to collect wood enough for the frame of an umiak, for he has only the drift-wood on the beach to select from, and the larger parts are often elaborately pieced together. When a suitable stick for making a stem or stern-post is found, the finder marks it for his own—and it is the unwritten law of the community that such marked property shall be respected—and when he has leisure goes out with his little adze and works away at it on the beach till he has hewn it into shape before he brings it home.

When he has at length collected all the pieces for the frame, he begins to put them together, without using a single nail in the whole structure. The heavy parts of the frame are neatly mortised together and secured with wooden pegs, while the lighter parts, such as ribs and gunwales, are secured by regularly sewing them with long, thin strips of whalebone, which are run through holes drilled in the two parts to be united.

The following pieces make up the frame of the umiak: Along the middle of the bottom runs one long timber, to the ends of which are scarfed the stem and stern-post, made of natural knees, and slanting so that the top of the boat is longer than the bottom. The top of each part is widened into a square block. This makes a high seat for the steersman in the stern and a sort of shelf in the bow. On each side of the bottom is another stout strip of wood, deeper than the keel, which make the edges of the flat bottom, being bent in and scarfed to the stem and stern-post, but spread apart amidships by the floor timbers, which are laid across the keel inside, but mortised into these side strips. There are a dozen or fifteen floor timbers, longest, of course, in the middle of the boat.

From the side strips rise fifteen or twenty pairs of ribs, fastened on with lashings of whalebone. These slope out a good deal amidships, but grow more nearly vertical toward the bow and stern. On the ends of these ribs are lashed the gunwales, round poles about two inches in diameter, running from bow to stern on each side. These run out beyond the stem and meet in a point, but only project a little beyond the stern-post. Along the ribs inside, about half-way down, is fastened a stout strip of wood on which the seats or thwarts, seven or eight in number, are secured, and to strengthen the frame still more another strip is fastened on outside of the ribs.