Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/152

 in his hand, and which, crossing the crack, broke the fall. The barometer was my best one, and is of course a hopeless wreck.

Carl and Christian, my two Danish recruits from Upernavik, have been setting nets for seal. These nets are made in the Greenland fashion, of seal-skin thongs, with large meshes. They are kept in a vertical position under the ice by stones attached to their lower margin; and the unsuspecting seal, swimming along in pursuit of a school of shrimps for a meal, or seeking a crack or hole in the ice to catch a breath of air, strikes it and becomes entangled in it, and is soon drowned. Most of the winter seal-fishing of Greenland is done in this manner; and it is in this that the dogs are most serviceable, in carrying the hunter rapidly from place to place in his inspection of the nets, and in taking home the captured animals upon the sledge. This species of hunting is attended with much risk, as the hunter is obliged to run out on the newly-formed ice. Jensen has enlivened many of my evenings with descriptions of his adventures upon the ice-fields while looking after his nets. On one occasion the ice broke up, and he was set adrift, and would have been lost had not his crystal raft caught on a small island, to which he escaped, and where he was forced to remain without shelter until the frost built for him a bridge to the main land. The hardihood and courage of these Greenland hunters is astonishing.

Although the wind has been blowing hard, I have strolled over to the north side of the Fiord on a visit to the Esquimau village of Etah, which is about four miles away in a northeasterly direction. The hut there, as I had already surmised, was uninhabited, but bore evidence of having been abandoned only a short