Harry Raven drew pictures of Arctic animals and the Eskimo gave us names for them in his language.
We arrived in Holsteinsborg about four [[33]]o’clock. It has a very good little harbor just inside the mouth of a fjord. A fjord is an indentation in the land, like a long narrow bay or sound, and usually the hills rise steeply on both sides. Dad says this Greenland scenery is very much like Norway.
The houses are all different colors making a very gay sight. There was a little red church on top of the hill, and all around the bottom was the village, houses made mostly of wood with sods around them to keep the cold out. Some of the native sod houses had tunnels leading into them like the igloos of the North.
The place where we landed was a little dock with a cannery on one side and a big sort of rack for kayaks belonging to the Eskimos on the other.
I had great fun trading at Holsteinsborg. Three of the sailors, Jim, Joe and Ralph, and myself went on shore with some old shirts and one pair of old pants. We went into about [[34]]ten or fifteen of the huts. There were only about twenty-five huts in the town. They were one-roomed houses with a raised sort of platform for a bed in the back of the room. The cooking and everything was done in the same room. The whole family sleep in one bed. The houses were very stuffy and smelt of skins and dogs. The dogs were all over the place, even lying in the tunnels so that you could hardly get through.
We Get a Basking Shark at Holsteinsborg.
At nine o’clock that night we left for a fjord called Ikortok, to drop Professor Hobbs and his party. We went inland about forty miles. We tied three dories together making a raft to move his stuff in from the boat. One trip the raft was a little too heavily laden and almost went down when one of the dories partly filled up with water.
While the last part of the unloading was going on, Dad, Carl and I went off to try the fishing, without any luck. On shore we saw a bird’s nest that looked as if it might be [[35]]a good specimen. We tried to get at it, climbing up a cliff, but couldn’t.
