The sail, which they are only able to use with a free wind, is square, narrow, and rather high, and is nowadays always made of drilling. Dark blue drilling appeared to be the most popular sort at the time of our visit. The head of the sail is laced to a light yard, and hoisted to the masthead by a halyard through a hole in the latter. The mast is a stout square pole 10 or 12 feet long and is set up well forward of amidships, without a step, the square butt resting against a bottom board, and held up by two forestays and two backstays, running from the masthead to the inside streak. All the rigging, stays, halyards, towing line, etc., are made of stout thong. The Greenlanders set up the mast in the bow of the umiak—as a sailor would say, “in the very eyes of her,”[446] but as far as I can learn the Western Eskimo all set it up as at Point Barrow.
The oars are very clumsily made with very narrow blades not over 3 inches broad. They are about 7 feet long and somewhat enlarged at the loom. Instead of resting in rowlocks, they are secured by two long loops of thong as in the diagram Fig. 344. To keep the oar from chafing the skin on the gunwale, they lash to the latter a long plate of bone. No. 89696 [1197] from Utkiavwĭñ is one of these plates. Two of these oars are commonly used in an umiak, one forward and one aft, and the women row with great vigor, swinging well from the hips, but do not keep stroke. The use of oars is so unusual among savages that it would be natural to suppose that these people had adopted the custom from the whites. If this be the case, the custom reached them long ago, and through very indirect channels.
When Thomas Simpson, in 1837, bought an umiak from some Point Barrow natives at Dease Inlet, he bought with it “four of their slender oars, which they used as tent poles, besides a couple of paddles; fitted the oars with lashings, and arranged our strange vessel so well that the ladies were in raptures, declaring us to be genuine Esquimaux, and not poor white men.”[447] The custom, moreover, appears to be widespread since Lyon speaks of seeing in 1821, “two very clumsy oars with flat blades, pulled by women,” in the umiaks at Hudson Strait.[448] It was practiced at a still earlier date in Greenland.[449]
Fig. 344.—Method of slinging the oar of umiak.
While at Point Barrow the oars have very narrow blades and the double paddles very broad ones, the reverse seemed to be the case in Greenland, where the double paddle, as already noticed, has blades not over 3 or 4 inches broad. Crantz describes the oars as “short and broad before, pretty much like a shovel, but only longer, and * * confined to their places on the gunnel with a strap of seal’s leather.” (Vol. 2, p. 149 and pl. VI) Although both oars and sails are undoubtedly quite ancient inventions (Frobisher in his description of Meta Incognita in Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589) pp. 621 and 628, speaks of skin boats with sails of entrail),[450] I am strongly inclined to believe that they are both considerably more recent than the paddles, not only on general principles, but from the fact that the whaling umiaks at Point Barrow use only paddles. There is no practical reason against using either oars or sails, and in fact the latter would often be of great advantage in silently approaching a whale, as the American whalemen have long ago discovered. It seems to me that this is merely another case of adhering to an obsolete custom on semireligious grounds. The paddles are usually about 4 or 5 feet long, made of one piece of driftwood, with slender round shafts, and lanceolate blades about 6 inches broad, and a short rounded cross handle at the upper end. (Fig. 345 shows two of the paddles belonging to the model.) The steersman uses a longer paddle, and stands in the stern or sits up on the head of the sternpost.
Fig. 345.—Model of umiak and paddles: (a) side view; (b) inside plan.