Greenlanders dancing
Equally ingenious is the use of an air bladder attached to their harpoons to retard the seal in its rush when struck, and to keep the harpoon floating if the quarry is missed. The point of the harpoon is also so fitted that, when the seal is struck, it slips out of the shaft, obviating the danger of the shaft being broken by the animal’s struggles, and of the barb slipping out of its body. The point is attached to the shaft by a thong.
Seals provide material for clothes, boots, tents, and food. The Greenland dogs are excellent for their purpose and draw sledges 30 or 40 miles a day over smooth ice easily; but the dog as a draught animal is an Asiatic invention. The Greenland sledge consists of a couple of boards for runners, 6 feet long, with cross pieces, and two upright poles for guiding. All is kept together by seal-skin thongs, thus affording elasticity. On smooth ice a pace of 16 miles an hour can be attained, the load for dogs being nearly 500 lb. Eskimo necessary furniture consists of lamps, wooden tubs, dishes, and stone pots. Their arms are bows and arrows, bird darts, javelins, and lances.
The wood required by the Greenland Eskimo is provided by the Arctic current. Flowing down the east coast of Greenland it is diverted by the Gulf Stream, turns round Cape Farewell, and flows up the coast of Greenland bearing abundance of drift wood. Again meeting the Baffin Bay current, it is turned again down into the Atlantic. This drift wood consists of coniferous trees which must come from Siberia. Pieces 60 feet long are found on the coast so far north as 60° 30′, one yielding 3 cords of wood in 63° N., and pieces of 12 to 30 feet are not uncommon.
The Angekoks, like the Shamans of Siberia, are the priests and physicians of the Eskimos, who believe in a great first cause, and in spirits, especially evil spirits, who have to be propitiated. They have myths and traditions, but none that throw any certain light on their origin and history. By far the best account of the arms, tools, and utensils of the Eskimos of West Greenland is by Porsild[7].
The most interesting tribe of Eskimos is that which was discovered by Sir John Ross on the north coast of Baffin’s Bay, probably descended from the last Asiatic arrivals. Having no canoes their progress south was stopped at the curving shores of Melville Bay, 300 miles round, nearly all occupied by glaciers coming down to the sea. Ross named them the “Arctic Highlanders.” They had dogs and sledges but no kayaks, consequently there was no communication with the Greenland Eskimos to the south.
The coast from Cape York to Etah, within Smith Sound, is the country of the Arctic Highlanders. It is broken by deep fjords, separated by magnificent headlands, the breeding-places of guillemots and kittiwakes, and the favourite home of millions of little auks or rotches. The Arctic Highlanders are stout well-built little men, thick-set and muscular, with round chubby faces, oblique eyes, and small and very thick hands. With marvellous endurance they are courageous, are ready to close with a bear, and have been known to enter into a conflict of four hours’ duration with a fierce walrus, on weak ice. Without wood, without bows and arrows, without canoes, they still secure abundance of food with their spears and darts. In summer they live in seal-skin tents, in winter their habitations are circular stone huts built at permanent stations along the coast. Their utensils consist of shallow cups made of seal-skin for receiving the water as it melts from a lump of snow and flows down a shoulder blade of a walrus, and of stone lamps. They eat their food raw and in large quantities. Their weapons are a lance of narwhal ivory and a harpoon, and nets to catch the little auks and other birds. The Arctic Highlanders possessed knives of meteoric iron, made by inserting in a row along a slit made in a haft of stone or ivory a number of thin flakes, carefully chipped to a circular form. This meteoric iron came from three huge boulders at the back of Bushnan Island, near Cape York.
The Arctic Highlander wears a shirt of bird-skin neatly sewn together next to the skin, with the soft down inwards, over which there is a loose kapetah or jumper of fox-skin, tight round the neck, where a hood is attached to it. The nessak or hood is lined with bird-skins and trimmed with fox fur. The breeches, called nannuk, are of bear-skin and come down to the knees, and above are just in contact with the kapetah, when the wearer is standing upright. On the feet bird-skin socks are worn with a padding of grass, over which come bear-skin boots. By means of their sledges these hunters can move swiftly to the bear-hunting grounds, and no hunters in the world display more indomitable courage and presence of mind, or more skill and judgment in the exercise of their craft. Their number, when first discovered, was about 300. From an ethnological point of view they are the most interesting of all savage tribes, by reason of their wonderful exodus and their isolation.
We have now passed in review all the dwellers on the Arctic Threshold, from Lapland round the northern shores of Siberia and America to Greenland, considering them with reference to their environment, and we have traced the wanderings of the Onkilon until we find the last remnant of the exodus on the northern shore of Baffin’s Bay. Such a brief survey is a necessary introduction to the history of Arctic enterprise.