In the preceding chapters little but an outline has been given of the activities of the day in an Eskimo encampment. Boat building is one of the occupations in which men and women jointly engage; but before this is described at the length it requires, there is much to be said about the dressing and fashioning of the various skins which form the most important item of Eskimo economy.

The Eskimo woman values none of her possessions more than the ooloo, a short-handled knife shaped like a small half-moon turf cutter, chiefly used for paring off the inner membrane of the stout sealskin for the lighter hangings of the summer tent, but of universal utility. With it she cuts out her garments or dismembers a seal. In addition to this she has steel or ivory needles and a thimble.

The Eskimo have no woven fabrics or European clothes until they come in contact with the whites, and—perhaps unfortunately—acquire the beginnings of a civilisation alien to the natural evolution and necessities of their lives.

Their own native dress consists entirely of deerskins for winter use and sealskins for the summer. [109]Both sets are warmly lined with fur. The deerskins employed as clothing are the summer and autumn hides; those flayed in the winter are reserved for the kaksak or sleeping blankets. The men’s and women’s tunics are lined either with fawn skins or the summer skins with the hair on. No underclothing is required, fur always being worn next to the skin. The man’s jacket is looser in shape than the woman’s, and the hood (nessak) fits closely round the face. The woman’s garment is quite different. It has shorter, baggy sleeves, is large and roomy at the back, fitting, however, tightly to the waist; it has a hood (amout) big enough for two heads, a short stomacher-like apron about twelve inches long in front, and a lengthy tail reaching to the heels behind. The Eskimo women carry their babies on their backs in this queer jacket. The child has no clothing on it, but it keeps admirably warm next the fur-clad mother. Its feet rest on her waist line and its head peers from out of the capacious hood over her shoulder.

Both sexes wear short, wide trousers. For footgear they have long deerskin stockings like Lifeguardsmen’s boots, with the hair turned next the skin, reaching well up over the knees under the pants. Over these is worn a sock like a Turkish slipper, made from the skin of the Large Glaucus Gull, the feathers being inside; and over this again goes a short sock of deerskin, with the hair turned outwards and upwards so as to enable the long boot, or kummik, to pull on easily. This boot is tied on below the knee and round the [110]ankle. The sole is made of the leather of the large ground seal, with the hair shaved off, and the leg is the skin of deer’s legs stoutly stitched together.

The women take immense pride in the cut, fit, workmanship and ornamentation of their dresses, showing no little taste and discrimination in the management of design and ornament. The various furs are introduced in lines, panels and patterns, with an eye to colour and texture a skilled furrier might envy.

Prior to the advent of Europeans to the Arctics, fringes of deerskin were the most popular form of ornament for clothing; but to-day the Eskimo women are passionately fond of elaborate beadwork. The beads are of European manufacture, but the design in which they are applied is native. The favourite beads are small and brightly coloured. The native sempstress will also sew two or three coins down the front of the inside jacket and down the tail of the dress, or even the bowls of a few spoons. These clink as they walk, and greatly delight their wearers.

The Eskimo tailor has a wonderfully correct eye, and can so scrutinise a figure as to be able to turn out a well-fitting suit of skins without taking a single measurement, or “trying on.”

The men’s clothes are plain, without ornamentation, and the fashion of them does not vary with the season. In summer they are lined with the white skins of the baby seal, which are as soft and fleecy as lambs’ wool; in winter, with the skins of the fawn, which are very soft and warm. [111]

The Eskimo housewife prides herself greatly upon her store of skins. These, and the soapstone cooking utensils, and the carefully housed poles for the summer tupik, dogs, sled, and kyak, constitute the wealth of a native family. Fine sewing thread is made from the sinew of deer’s legs, scraped and dried. For stouter purposes, seal sinew is used. Eskimo stitching requires to be seen to be appreciated. It is amusing to note that the age of a child can be told at a glance by the length of the tail of its little jacket.

Apropos generally of domestic tastes, a word must be added on the women’s hairdressing. The hair is generally parted down the centre and plaited on either side of the face, the two plaits being looped under the ears (reminiscent of the early Victorian style!) and tied in a knot at the back. In some tribes the women gather their hair up and bind it all into a stiff vertical cone on the top of the head. They weave into this stubborn erection every hair which comes out, so that in time a woman’s age may be guessed by the size of her topknot. It used to be the fashion in bygone days to tattoo the face with linear designs, but this has now practically died out.

It is a common error of writers upon the Eskimo folk to assert that they oil themselves to keep out the cold, that they drink oil as a food, and revel in grease generally. Nothing of this is correct. The dirtier and the greasier a man is, the colder he is; so every effort is made—not after cleanliness exactly, as that is an impracticable standard—to keep grease from [112]the clothes and the person. When engaged in preparing or cleaning anything very oily, the women remove part of their dress to save it, and afterwards rub away as much of the grease as possible from their hands and arms. Seal oil and melted blubber act as strong purgatives, hence it would be impossible to use them as drink, besides they are required for the lamps.

Perhaps the next most important business of the Eskimo women, after cooking and making the clothes, is the preparation of skins for the two types of boat in use on the coast. This entails considerable labour and skill. The men are responsible for the framework.

The kyak—a creation as truly national to these intrepid coasters as the snowshoe may be to the Indian, the ski to the Norwegian, and the alpenstock to the Swiss mountaineer—is a covered canoe, graceful as a fish, for use at sea. It can be handled in the roughest weather. It consists of a light framework, formerly of whalebone, but now generally of driftwood, fastened together with thongs of sealskin. It is from eighteen to twenty feet in length, strong and elastic to a degree, and entirely covered with skins, almost resembling a torpedo in shape, with long, tapering extremities. There is a small circular opening amid-ships, where the kyaker sits, fitting closely round his body. In rough weather he wears a waterproof jacket (of seal gut), the hood fitting tightly round his face and the sleeves to his wrists. The lower edge [113]of this comes over the opening in the canoe and is laced round it, so that man and craft are fairly one.

The Rev. A. L. Fleming, formerly a naval architect, informed the writer that the lines of the kyak are perfect, and from the point of view of sea-going architecture could not be improved. The Baffin Land kyak is broader than the Greenland type. The latter is much narrower, and requires great skill to handle. Readers of Arctic literature will recall Nansen’s account of the extraordinary feats performed by the Eskimo on the west coast of Greenland in manœuvring these canoes. The Baffin Islanders are also very skilful. They can right themselves, if completely overturned, by a peculiar quick jerk of the paddle. The kyak cannot fill, should the waves wash right over it. It probably comes nearer the ideal of an unsinkable boat than many a more ambitious construction. It would be hard to say, as between hunting and fishing (the staple business of their lives), which is the characteristic national “sport” of the Eskimo; but certainly no one not born and bred to the handling of the kyak could acquire the native degree of ease and daring.

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]