Carl Shows a South Greenland Youngster How to Use a Pathex Motion Picture Camera.
When we went out from the land in our little boat we were in very shallow water. The propeller of our Johnson engine hit the bottom and the little engine jumped loose and fell overboard. Luckily we were able to get it again. We rowed all the way back to the Morrissey, as the engine was full of salt water and couldn’t be made to run. The tide was coming in the fjord with great force and it was a hard row, about four miles. When we came to a beach we pulled the boat up and worked on the engine. I took our gun to try and get some birds for eating or for specimens. By the time I was up at the other end of the beach they had given up hope of drying the engine and started to row, calling out that I was to walk back along the shore as that would make the rowing easier. I didn’t like the idea much but I either had to walk or stay there. I had on native skin [[36]]boots called kamiks which made it pretty hard to walk on rocks. I was afraid of dogs, too, because we had found a litter of dog pups on shore not far from where the Morrissey was anchored. And a mother dog in the North is apt to be as fierce as a wolf when she has pups. I saw one a few hundred yards away so I sat down behind a rock and waited for him to move on.
When I reached the shore near the boat they sent in a dory to take me off.
The next day we stopped at some little villages along the fjord. The Eskimos came out in small boats and kayaks, to trade with us and to see the white men and their strange schooner. They brought out a porpoise because we asked for any fish they had, for specimens.
That afternoon we arrived at a big bird rookery. It was a wonderful sight. The whole side of the cliff was covered with thousands of kittywakes nests. That is a sort of [[37]]small gull which sometimes gets down to New York in the winter. The birds were making a terrible noise, chattering continuously.
We went up beside the cliff in dories and shot a few birds for specimens and others for eating. We took movies of the birds flying around the cliff. At a distance the flying birds, great clouds of them, looked like a blizzard.
Then we started for Holsteinsborg to drop two men we had picked up there. We arrived at three o’clock in the morning and instead of having the Morrissey go in, we sent them in in the launch, as we wanted to go on to Disko as fast as we could.
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