Their marriage engagements are, of necessity, mere matters of convenience. Their customs allow of a plurality of wives; but among this tribe, even if there were sufficient women, no hunter probably could support two families. The marriage arrangement is made by the parents, and the parties are fitted to each other as their ages best suit. When a boy comes of age, he marries the first girl of suitable years. There is no marriage ceremony further than that the boy is required to carry off his bride by main force; for, even among these blubber-eating people, the woman only saves her modesty by a sham resistance, although she knows years beforehand that her destiny is sealed and that she is to become the wife of the man from whose embraces, when the nuptial day comes, she is obliged by the inexorable law of public opinion to free herself if possible, by kicking and screaming with might and main until she is safely landed in the hut of her future lord, when she gives up the combat very cheerfully and takes possession of her new abode. The betrothal often takes place at a very early period of life and at very dissimilar ages. A bright-looking boy named Arko, which means "The spear thrower," who is not over twelve years of age, is engaged to a girl certainly of twenty, named Kartak, "The girl with the large breasts." Why was this? I inquired. "There is no other woman for him." I thought he looked rather dubious of his future matrimonial prospects when I asked him how soon he proposed to carry off this big-breasted bride. Two others, whom I judged to be about ten years each, were to be married in this romantic style as soon as the lover had caught his first seal. This, I was told, is the test of manhood and maturity.
I talked to the oldest hunter of the tribe, an ancient, patriarchal-looking individual named Kesarsoak,—"He of the white hairs,"—about the future of the tribe. The prospect to him was the same as to Kalutunah,—"Our people have but a few more suns to live!" Would they all come up to Etah if I should return, and stay there, and bring guns and hunters? His answer was a prompt, "Yes." He told me, as Kalutunah had done before, that Etah was the best hunting-place on the coast, only the ice broke up so soon and was always dangerous; while Whale Sound was frozen during nearly all the year, and gave the hunters greater security.
TYNDALL GLACIER.
After returning to the schooner, I pulled up into Barden Bay, taking with me the magnetic and surveying instruments and facilities for completing my botanical and other collections, and for photographing the fine scenery of the bay. Landing on its north shore, we found the hill-side covered in many places with a richer green sward than I had ever seen north of Upernavik, except once on a former occasion at Northumberland Island. The slope was girdled with the same tall cliffs which everywhere meet the eye along this coast; and the same summer streams of melted snow tumbled over them, and down the slope from the mountain sides. The day was quite calm and the sky almost cloudless. The sun shone broadly upon us, and the temperature was 51°. Immense schools of whales and walrus, with an occasional seal, were sporting in the water; flocks of sea-fowl went careering about the icebergs and through the air, and myriads of butterflies fluttered among the flowers; while from the opposite side of the bay an immense glacier,[17] whose face was almost buried in the sea, carried the eye along a broad and winding valley, up steps of ice of giant height, and over smooth plains of whiteness, around the base of the hills, until at length the slope pierced the very clouds, and, reappearing above the curling vapors, was lost in the blue canopy of the heavens.
[17] I have named this glacier in honor of Professor John Tyndall.
TYNDALL GLACIER.
Three glaciers were visible from my point of observation,—a small one, to the right, barely touching the water, and hanging, as if in suspensive agony, in a steep declivity; another, at the head of the bay, was yet miles away from the sea; while before us, in the centre of the bay, there came pouring down the rough and broken flood of ice before alluded to, which, bulging far out into the bay, formed a coast-line of ice over two miles long.
The whole glacier system of Greenland was here spread out before me in miniature. A lofty mountain ridge, like a whale's back, held in check the expanding mer de glace, but a broad cleft cut it in twain, and the stream before me had burst through the opening like cataract rapids tumbling from the pent-up waters of a lake. The sublimity and picturesqueness of the scene was greatly heightened by two parallel rocky ridges, whose crests were to the left of the glacier. These crests are trap-dykes, left standing fifty feet perhaps above the sloping hill-side below them, by the wasting away of the sandstone through which they have forced their way in some great convulsion of Nature.
On the day following, I visited this glacier and made a careful examination of it, pulling first along its front in a boat and then mounting to its surface.
GOTHIC GLACIER.