Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/287



In consideration for the kindness which I had shown these people, they gave me a set of their hunting and domestic implements, the principal of them being a lance, harpoon, coil of line, a rabbit-trap, a lamp, pot, flint and steel, with some lamp-wick and tinder. The lance was a wooden shaft, probably from Dr. Kane's lost ship, the Advance, with an iron spike lashed firmly to one end of it, and a piece of walrus tusk, shod with sharp iron, at the other. The harpoon staff was a narwal tooth or horn, six feet long,—a very hard and solid piece of ivory, and perfectly straight. The harpoon head was a piece of walrus tusk, three inches long, with a hole through the centre for the line, a hole into one end for the sharpened point of the staff, and at the other end it was, like the lance-head, tipped with iron. The line was simply a strip of raw seal-hide about fifty feet long, and was made by a continuous cut around the body of the seal. The rabbit-trap was merely a seal-skin line with a multitude of loops dangling from it. The lamp was a shallow dish of soft soap-stone, in shape not unlike a clam-shell, and was eight inches by six. The pot was a square-*sided vessel of the same material. The flint was a piece of hard granite, the steel a lump of crude iron pyrites, the wick was dried moss, and the tinder the delicate down-like covering of the willow catkins.

Tcheitchenguak told me that he was preparing the lances for a walrus hunt, and that he and Hans intended to try their skill on the morrow. The walrus had been very numerous in the open waters outside the harbor all through the winter, and their shrill cry could be heard at almost any time from the margin of the ice. The flesh of these animals is the staple food of the Esquimaux; and although they prize the