ird.
9. Buttons of bone, glass, or stone, to be placed in holes in the lips,
natural size.
10. Ivory diadem, two-thirds. ]

On the north side of the harbour we found an old European or
American train-oil boiling establishment. In the neighbourhood of it
were two Eskimo graves. The corpses had been laid on the ground
fully clothed, without the protection of any coffin, but surrounded
by a close fence consisting of a number of tent poles driven
crosswise into the ground. Alongside one of the corpses lay a
_kayak_ with oars, a loaded double-barrelled gun with locks at
half-cock and caps on, various other weapons, clothes, tinderbox,
snow-shoes, drinking-vessels, two masks carved in wood and smeared
with blood (figures 1 and 2, page 241), and strangely-shaped animal
figures. Such were seen also in the tents. Bags of sealskin,
intended to be inflated and fastened to harpoons as floats, were
sometimes ornamented with small faces carved in wood (figure 3, page
241). In one of the two amulets of the same kind, which I brought
home with me, one eye is represented by a piece of blue enamel stuck
in, and the other by a piece of iron pyrites fixed in the same way.
Behind two tents were found, erected on posts a metre and a half in
height, roughly-formed wooden images of birds with expanded wings
painted red. I endeavoured without success to purchase these
tent-idols[350] for a large new felt hat--an article of exchange for
which in other cases I could obtain almost anything whatever. A
dazzlingly white _kayak_ of a very elegant shape, on the other hand,
I purchased without difficulty for an old felt hat and 500 Remington
cartridges.

[Illustration: ESKIMO GRAVE. (After a drawing by O. Nordquist.) ]

As a peculiar proof of the ingenuity of the Americans when offering
their goods for sale, it may be mentioned in conclusion that an
Eskimo, who came to the vessel during our stay in the harbour,
showed us a printed paper, by which a commercial house at San
Francisco offered to "sporting gentlemen" at Behring's Straits
(Eskimo?) their stock of excellent hunting shot.

As the west coast of Europe is washed by the Gulf Stream, there also
runs along the Pacific coast of America a warm current, which gives
the land a much milder climate than that which prevails on the
neighbouring Asiatic side, where, as on the east coast of Greenland,
there runs a cold northerly current. The limit of trees therefore in
north-western America goe