In former times beautiful and good weapons were probably highly prized by so warlike a people as the Chukches, but now weapons are properly scarce antiquities, which, however, are still regarded with a certain respect, and therefore are not readily parted with. The lance which was found beside the corpse ([fig. 2 on p. #105]) shows by its still partially preserved gold decorations that it had been forged by the hand of an artist. Probably it has formed part of the booty won long ago in the fights with the Cossacks. I procured by barter an ivory coat of mail ([fig. 7 on p. 105]), and remains of another. The ivory plates of the coat of mail are twelve centimetres in length, four in breadth, and nearly one in thickness, holes being bored at their edges for the leather thongs by which the plates are bound together. This binding has been so arranged that the whole coat of mail, when not in use, may be rolled together.
Along with the spear and the coat of mail the old Chukches used the bow for martial purposes. Now this weapon is employed only for hunting, but it appears as if even for this purpose it would soon go out of use. Some of the natives, however, use the bow with great accuracy of aim. The bows which I procured commonly consisted of a badly worked, slightly bent, elastic piece of wood, with the ends drawn together by a skin thong. Only some old bows had a finer form. They were larger, and made with care, for instance, they were covered with birch-bark, and strengthened by an artistic plaiting of sinews on the outer side. The arrows are of many kinds, partly with bone or wooden, and partly with iron, points. Feathers are generally wanting. The shaft is a clumsily worked piece of wood. Crossbows are occasionally used. We have even seen bows for playthings, with carefully made, non-pointed arrows. At the encampments near the winter station we found a couple of percussion-lock guns, with caps, powder and lead. They were evidently little used, and my attempt to induce the Chukches to undertake long journeys by promises of a gun with the necessary supply of powder and lead completely failed. When the Chukch, who carried our letters to Nischni Kolymsk, was after his return rewarded with a red shirt, a gun, caps, powder and ball, he wished to exchange the gun and ammunition for an axe.
The principal livelihood of the Chukches is derived from hunting and fishing. Both are very abundant at certain seasons of the year, but are less productive during the cold season, in which case, in consequence of the little forethought of the savage, there arises great scarcity both of food and fuel and the means of melting snow. Of their hunting and fishing implements I cannot give so complete accounts as I should wish, because they very carefully avoided taking any of the Vega's hunters with them on their hunting excursions.
The rough seal is taken with nets, made of strong seal-skin thongs. The nets are set in summer among the ground-ices along the shore. The animal gets entangled in the net and is suffocated, as it can no longer come to the surface to breathe. In winter the seal is taken partly with nets in "leads" among the ice, partly with the harpoon when it crawls out of its hole, it is also taken by means of a noose of thongs placed over its hole. In order to avoid the loss of the valuable seal-blood, which is considered an extraordinary delicacy by the Chukches, the animal is never killed by an edged tool, if that can be avoided, but by repeated blows on the head. The bear is killed by the lance or knife, the latter, according to the statement of a Chukch, being the surest weapon, the walrus and the largest kind of seals with the harpoon ([fig. 1, p. 105]), or a lance resembling the Greenlander's. Even the whale is harpooned, but with a harpoon considerably larger than the common, and to which as many as six inflated seal-skins are fastened. In order to kill a whale a great many such harpoons must be struck into it. Birds are taken in snares, or killed with bird-javelins, arrows, and slings. The last mentioned ([fig. 3, p. 105]) consist of a number of round balls of bone fastened to leather thongs, which are knotted together. Some feathers are often fixed to the knot in order to increase the resistance of the air to this part of the sling. When the sling is thrown the bone balls are thereby scattered in all directions, and the probability of hitting becomes greater. Every man and boy in summer carries with him such a sling, often bound round his head, and is immediately prepared to cast it at flocks of birds flying past. Common slings are also used, consisting of two thongs and a piece of skin fastened to them. The bird-dart ([fig. 5, p. 105]) completely resembles that used by the Eskimo. A kind of snare was used by the boys at Yinretlen to catch small birds for our zoologist. They were made of whalebone fibres.
Fish are caught partly with nets, partly with the hook or with a sort of leister ([fig. 6, p. 105]). The nets are made of sinew-thread. I procured several of these, and was surprised at the small value which the natives set upon them, notwithstanding the hard labour which must have been required for preparing the thread and making the net. The nets are also sometimes used as drift-nets. The fishing-rod consists of a shaft only thirty centimetres long, to which is fixed a short line made of sinews. The extreme end of the line passes through a large sinker of ivory, to which are attached two or three tufts each with its hook of bone only, or of bone and copper, or bone and iron. The hook has three or four points projecting in different directions. I have before described how the hook is used in autumn in fishing for roach, also how the productive fishing goes on in the neighbourhood of Tjapka.
Even for the coast Chukch reindeer flesh appears to form an important article of food. He probably purchases his stock of it from the reindeer-Chukches for train-oil, skin straps, walrus tusks, and perhaps fish. I suppose that part of the frozen reindeer blood, which the inhabitants of the villages at our winter station used for soup, had been obtained in the same way. Wild reindeer, or reindeer that had run wild, were hunted with the lasso. Such animals, however, do not appear now to be found in any large numbers on the Chukch peninsula.
Besides fish and flesh the Chukches consume immense quantities of herbs and other substances from the vegetable kingdom.[283] The most important of these are the leaves and young branches of a great many different plants (for instance Salix, Rhodiola, &c.) which are collected and after being cleaned are preserved in seal-skin sacks. Intentionally or unintentionally the contents of the sacks sour during the course of the summer. In autumn they freeze together to a lump of the form of the stretched seal-skin. The frozen mass is cut in pieces and used with flesh, much in the same way as we eat bread. Occasionally a vegetable soup is made from the pieces along with water, and is eaten warm. In the same way the contents of the reindeer stomach is used. Algae and different kinds of roots are also eaten, among the latter a kind of wrinkled tubers, which, as already stated ([Vol. I., p. 450]) have a very agreeable taste.
In summer the Chukches eat cloud-berries, red bilberries, and other berries, which are said to be found in great abundance in the interior of the country. The quantity of vegetable matter which is collected for food at that season of the year is very considerable, and the natives do not appear to be very particular in their choice, if the leaves are only green, juicy, and free from any bitter taste. When the inhabitants, in consequence of scarcity of food, removed in the beginning of February from Pitlekaj, they carried with them several sacks of frozen vegetables, and there were still some left in the cellars to be taken away as required. In the tents at St. Lawrence Bay there lay heaps of leaf-clad willow-twigs and sacks filled with leaves and stalks of Rhodiola. The writers who quote the Chukches as an example of a race living exclusively on substances derived from the animal kingdom thus commit a complete mistake. On the contrary, they appear at certain seasons of the year to be more "graminivorous" than any other people I know, and with respect to this their taste appears to me to give the anthropologist a hint of certain traits of the mode of life of the people of the Stone Age which have been completely overlooked. To judge from the Chukches our primitive ancestors by no means so much resembled beasts of prey as they are commonly imagined to have done, and it may, perhaps, have been the case that "bellum omnium inter omnes" was first brought in with the higher culture of the Bronze or Iron Age.
The cooking of the Chukches, like that of most wild races, is very simple. After a successful catch all the dwellers in the tent gormandise on the killed animal, and appear to find a special pleasure in making their faces and hands as bloody as possible. Alternately with the raw flesh are eaten pieces of blubber and marrow, and bits of the intestines which have been freed from their contents merely by pressing between the fingers. Fish is eaten not only in a raw state, but also frozen so hard that it can be broken in pieces. When opportunity offers the Chukches do not, however, neglect to boil their food, or to roast pieces of flesh over the train-oil lamp—the word roast ought however in this case to be exchanged for soot. At a visit which Lieutenant Hovgaard made at Najtskaj, the natives in the tent where he was a guest ate for supper first seal-flesh soup, then boiled fish, and lastly, boiled seal-flesh. They thus observed completely the order of eating approved in Europe. The Chukches are unacquainted with other forks than their fingers, and even the use of the spoon is not common. Many carry about with them a spoon of copper, tinned iron, or bone ([fig. 8, p. 117]). The soup is often drunk directly out of the cooking vessel, or sucked up through hollow bones ([see the figure on p. 104]). Those are used as dunking cups, and like the spoons