instituting a comparison between the household articles of the Eskimo and the Chukches, I examined carefully the skin-bags which the natives had with them. In doing so I picked out one thing after the other, while they did not object to me making an inventory. One of them, however, showed great unwillingness to allow me to get to the bottom of the sack, but this just made me curious to ascertain what precious thing was concealed there. I was urgent, and went through the bag half with violence, until at last, in the bottom, I got a solution of the riddle—a loaded revolver. Several of the natives had also breechloaders. The oldest age with stone implements, and the most recent period with breechloaders, thus here reach hands one to the other.
Many natives were evidently migrating to more northerly hunting-grounds and fishing places, perhaps also to the markets and play-booths, which Dr. John Simpson describes in his well-known paper on the West Eskimo.[347] Others had already pitched their summer tents on the banks of the inner harbour, or of the river before mentioned. On the other hand, there was found in the region only a small number of winter dwellings abandoned during the warm season of the year. The population consisted, as has been said, of Eskimo. They did not understand a word of Chukch. Among them, however, we found a Chukch woman, who stated that true Chukches were found also on the American side, north of Behring's Straits. Two of the men spoke a little English, one had even been at San Francisco, another at Honolulu. Many of their household articles reminded us of contact with American whalers, and justice demands the recognition of the fact that in opposition to what we commonly see stated, contact with men of civilised race appears to have been to the advantage and improvement of the savage in an economical and moral point of view. Most of them now lived in summer-tents of thin cotton cloth, many wore European clothes, others were clad in trousers of seal or reindeer-skin and a light, soft, often beautifully ornamented pesk of marmot skin, over which in rainy weather was worn an overcoat made of pieces of gut sewn together. The arrangement of the hair resembled that of the Chukches. The women were tattooed with some lines on the chin. Many of the men wore small moustaches, some even a scanty beard, while others had attempted the American goatee. Most of them, but not all, had two holes from six to seven millimetres in length, cut in the
lips below the corners of the mouth. In these holes were worn large pieces of bone, glass, or stone (figure 9, page 237). But these ornaments were often removed, and then the edges of the large holes closed so much that the face was not much disfigured. Many had in addition a similar hole forward in the lip. It struck me, however, that this strange custom was about to disappear completely, or at least to be Europeanised by the exchange of holes in the ears for holes in the mouth. An almost full-grown young woman had a large blue glass bead hanging from the nose, in whose partition a hole had been made for its suspension, but she was very much embarrassed and hid her head in a fold of mama's pesk, when this piece of grandeur attracted general attention. All the women had long strings of beads in the ears. They wore bracelets of iron or copper, resembling those of the Chukches. The colour of the skin was not very dark, with perceptible redness on the cheeks, the hair black and tallow-like, the eyes small, brown, slightly oblique, the face flat, the nose small and depressed at the root. Most of the natives were of average height, appeared to be healthy and in good condition, and were marked neither by striking thinness nor corpulence. The feet and the hands were small.
A certain elegance and order prevailed in their small tents, the floor of which was covered with mats of plaited plants. In many places vessels formed of cocoa-nut shells were to be seen, brought thither, like some of the mats, by whalers from the South Sea Islands. For the most part their household and hunting implements, axes, knives, saws, breechloaders, revolvers, &c., were of American origin, but they still used or preserved in the lumber repositories of the tent, bows and arrows, bird-darts, bone boat-hooks, and various stone implements. The fishing implements especially were made with extraordinary skill of coloured sorts of bone or stone, glass beads, red pieces of the feet of certain swimming birds, &c. The different materials were bound together by twine made of whalebone in such a