Fig. 115.—Small crooked knives.
Fig. 116.—Crooked knife.
All of the crooked knives in the collection are genuine implements which have been actually in use, and do not differ in type from the crooked knives in the Museum from the Mackenzie district, Kotzebue Sound, and other parts of Alaska. Similar knives appear to be used among the Siberian Eskimo and the Chukches, who have adopted their habits. Hooper (Tents, etc., p. 175), mentions “a small knife with a bent blade and a handle, generally made of the tip of a deer’s horn,” as one in general use at Plover Bay, and handled in the same skillful way as at Point Barrow.[275] Among the Eskimo of the central region they are almost entirely unknown. The only mention I have seen of such tools is in Parry’s Second Voyage (p. 504), where he speaks of seeing at Iglulik “several open knives with crooked wooden handles,” which he thinks “must have been obtained by communication alongshore with Hudson Bay.” I can find no specimen, figure, or description of the sa´nat (“tool”), the tool par excellence of the Greenlanders, except the following definition in Kleinschmidt’s “Grønlandsk Ordbog”: “2. Specially a narrow, long-hafted knife, which is sharpened on one side and slightly curved at the tip (and which is a Greenlander’s chief tool).” This seems to indicate that this knife, so common in the West, is equally common in Greenland.[276]
Fig. 117.—Crooked knives, flint bladed.
Whether these people used crooked knives before the introduction of iron is by no means certain, though not improbable. Fig. 117a, No. 89633 [1196], from Utkiavwĭñ, is a knife made by imbedding a flake of gray flint in the lower edge of a haft of reindeer antler, of the proper shape and curvature for a mĭdlĭñ handle. The haft is soiled and undoubtedly old, while the flaked surfaces of the flint do not seem fresh, and the edge shows slight nicks, as if it had been used. Had this knife been followed by others equally genuine looking, I should have no hesitation in pronouncing it a prehistoric knife, and the ancestor of the present steel one. The fact, however, that its purchase gave rise to the manufacture of a host of flint knives all obviously new and more and more clumsily made, until we refused to buy any more, leads me to suspect that it was fabricated with very great care from old material, and skillfully soiled by the maker.
Ten of these knives of flint were purchased within a fortnight before we detected the deceit. Fig. 117b, No. 89636 [1212] is one of the best of these counterfeits, made by wedging a freshly flaked flint blade into the haft of an old savigrón, which has been somewhat trimmed to receive the blade and soiled and charred to make it look old. Other more carelessly made ones had clumsily carved handles of whale’s bone, with roughly flaked flints stuck into them and glued in with oil dregs. All of these came from Utkiavwĭñ. Another suspicious circumstance is that a few days previously two slate-bladed crooked knives had been brought down from Nuwŭk and accepted without question as ancient. On examining the specimens since our return, I find that while the hafts are certainly old, the blades, which are of soft slate easily worked, are as certainly new. Fig. 118a, 118b, represent these two knives (89580 [1062], 89586 [1061]), which have the blades lashed on with deer sinew. It is worthy of note in this connection that there are no stone knives of this pattern in the museum from any other locality.