The sealskins for these canoes are bleached. Either they are scalded, or tied in bundles and hung up in a warm atmosphere to ferment. This process is allowed to go on for a week or two, until the stench becomes unbearable. When taken down and shaved with the ooloo, the black epidermis comes away with the hair, leaving the skins beautifully white. The inner membranes [[114]]are left intact. The next step is to stitch the skins together. Bleached hides may be made to alternate with unbleaced ones, by way of ornament; or the entire covering may be merely black or brown.
The thread is sinew from seal flesh, since it must be derived from the same source as the skins, to ensure the same degree of shrinking and stretching. The seams are double stitched, first through the skin only, leaving the membrane untouched, and then oversewing the latter, so as to make them perfectly watertight. The moistened skins are then loosely applied to the framework; as they shrink and dry they fit to it exactly, and form a light, drum-tight covering over the whole. It is part of the man’s job to fit the wooden rim to the opening on top, and to make the loops which serve to secure his weapons.
He carries a three-pronged bird spear on the left hand side in front of him; on the right is his sealing spear, and between the two is a small round tray for the coiled seal line fixed to the detachable spearhead. Behind him on the left is his nixie or hook, on the right a heavy harpoon for striking walrus or the larger creatures he may encounter, between the two and immediately behind him an inflated sealskin with the end of his sealing line attached. Thus equipped, the canoe is complete, a thing of pride to its owner, which will last all his life and be handed down to his sons and their sons after him.
The sealing spear has an ivory (or nowadays a steel) butt for breaking ice, and acts as an ice chisel. [[115]]Its shaft consists of a piece of driftwood, its long keen point is made from part of the jawbone or rib of the whale, and its detachable barbed head is of steel or ivory. The long line attached to this is a stout strip of white whale hide. The harpoon, too, is of wood and ivory, as also is the long hunting knife and the small kit of lesser tools without which the hunter seldom moves. All these things are made during the endless winter evenings, while sitting round the seal oil lamps in the igloo, or on stormy days when the Arctic blizzard obliterates the world without. (There is an interesting collection of Eskimo dresses and implements and utensils to be seen in the Ethnological Gallery at the British Museum; but perhaps even more representative a one is that in the Natural History Museum in New York.)
The paddle of the kyak is made from a long piece of driftwood. Its proper length is the span of the owner (the full extent of the two extended arms), and half a span again. The blades are narrow, since they are for use at sea, and engage the most skilful attention of the craftsman. Both are tipped with ivory. This pouteek, as it is called, can be used as an outrigger. On top of the kyak, in front of the man, there are four strongly made loops of hide, the exact width of the blade of the paddle. If the rower wishes to stand up or give play to free movement, to cut up and store away a seal either upon the craft or inside it, he cannot do so without an outrigger or he would simply capsize. To prevent this, he pushes one end [[116]]of the paddle into the loops, which hold it fast. The other end, outboard, acts as a counter-weight and exactly balances the canoe. It is then perfectly stable and almost impossible to upset. The dexterity of the kyaker has already been alluded to. He can do anything with this boat. His confidence is so complete that not infrequently, when a heavy wave is atop of him, he will deliberately turn turtle, receive the weight of the water on the bottom, and right himself when the moment is passed.
The Umiak is a very different craft, and serves the Eskimo family as a sort of general pantechnicon and removing van. It consists of a large, clumsy framework of wood, covered with the skins of the big ground seal, which are dressed into a thick tough leather. It is really an open sailing boat, capable of carrying perhaps six families and a huge and miscellaneous cargo. It has a square stem and stern and a stumpy mast set well forward in the bows. The large square sail used to be made in earlier days of skin stitched together, or of the intestines of seals blown out and dried, then split open, the long, broad strips alternating with narrow strips of the same material, to ensure equal stretching and shrinking. Nowadays, the natives provide themselves with sail-cloth from the trading posts. The Umiak is an unhandy thing to manage, but a good enough boat in a heavy sea way. When on a long voyage up or down the coast or across the bays, in former times, the Umiak had a double skin; the outer covering becomes so waterlogged [[117]]and the movement so sluggish that the whole thing is cast off, and the journey proceeds in the inner, lighter and drier shell. The gut sail requires constant wetting to prevent it splitting into ribbons. This primitive concern is paddled by women when the paddles become necessary, but a man has the steering in his charge.
The oars for the Umiak are clumsy things compared to the kyak paddle. The blades are rough oblongs of wood, almost like spades, fitted to poles of wood by no means necessarily straight, and bound on by thongs of hide. Sometimes the oar is quite a crooked branch, and a collection of these in the hide hung boat looks about as prehistoric an outfit as Mr. E. T. Reed’s most comic imagination might depict among his inimitable parodies of life in the neolithic period.
The Kyak and the Umiak are the two purely native types of boat used on the Arctic coast. The people, however, are familiar and handy enough nowadays with rowing and sailing boats of European model, wherever they have had the opportunity of using and knowing them. They have other ingenious means of getting about on the water when boats of any description are not to be had at all. The hunter at the edge of the floe can stand and paddle himself away out to sea on a raft or slab of ice detached from the mass; and the deerstalker inland, anxious to cross a sheet of water or a river, will utilise a skin stuffed with dried heather, stoutly bound about with thongs of [[118]]hide. He sits on this and skims off as happily as a water-beetle.
The possession of a couple of boats like the foregoing, of a good store of hunting weapons, plenty of skins, a team of well-trained dogs, and two sleds—one, a short, light, travelling affair for hunting, and the other a heavy, long-distance thing for the migrations of the family—constitute the Eskimo house-holder’s wealth, and determine his social precedence and standing in the tribe. [[119]]