glish mother shudder to see the manner in which children five
or six years old are at all times freely trusted with a knife to be used
in this way.

The length of one of the best of seven canoes belonging to these
Esquimaux was twenty-five feet, including a narrow-pointed projection,
three feet long at each end, which turns a little upward from the
horizontal. The extreme breadth, which is just before the circular hole,
was twenty-one inches, and the depth ten inches and a half. The plane of
the upper surface of the canoe, except in the two extreme projections,
bends downward a little from the centre towards the head and stern,
giving it the appearance of what in ships is called "broken-backed." The
gunwales are of fir, in some instances of one piece, three or four
inches broad in the centre, and tapering gradually away towards the
ends. The timbers, as well as the fore-and-aft connecting pieces, are of
the same material, the former being an inch square, and sometimes so
close together as to require between forty and fifty of them in one
canoe: which, when thus "in frame," is one of the prettiest things of
the kind that can be imagined. The skin with which the canoe is covered
is exclusively that of the _neitiek_, prepared by scraping off the hair
and fat with an _ooloo_, and stretching it tight on a frame over the
fire; after which and a good deal of chewing, it is sown on by the women
with admirable neatness and strength. Their paddles have a blade at each
end, the whole length being nine feet and a half; the blades are covered
with a narrow plate of bone round the ends to secure them from
splitting; they are always made of fir, and generally of several pieces
scarfed and woolded together.

In summer they rest their canoes upon two small stones raised four feet
from the ground, and in winter on a similar structure of snow; in one
case to allow them to dry freely, and in the other to prevent the
snowdrift from covering, and the dogs from eating them. The difficulty
of procuring a canoe may be concluded from the circumstance of there
being at Winter Island twenty men able to manage one, and only seven
canoes among them. Of these, indeed, only three or four were in good
repair; the rest being wholly or in part stripped of the skin, of which
a good deal was occasionally cut off during the winter, to make boots,
shoes, and mittens for our people. We found no _oomiak_, or woman's
boat, among them, and understood that they