Northward over the great ice : a narrative of life and work along the shores and upon the interior ice-cap of northern Greenland in the years 1886 and 1891-1897, with a description of the little tribe of Smith Sound Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world, and an account of the discovery and bringing home of the Saviksue or great Cape York meteorites . f, and made me prize more highlythe exquisitely soft, light, velvety autumn pelts ofthe reindeer, the best of all furs for clothine andsleeping-bags. It was a part of my plan to obtain this materialfrom the Whale-Sound region, and
Northward over the great ice : a narrative of life and work along the shores and upon the interior ice-cap of northern Greenland in the years 1886 and 1891-1897, with a description of the little tribe of Smith Sound Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world, and an account of the discovery and bringing home of the Saviksue or great Cape York meteorites . f, and made me prize more highlythe exquisitely soft, light, velvety autumn pelts ofthe reindeer, the best of all furs for clothine andsleeping-bags. It was a part of my plan to obtain this materialfrom the Whale-Sound region, and my hopes werefully realised. My men shot all the deer we needed,the skins were stretched and dried at Red Cliff, I de-vised and cut the patterns for the suits and sleeping-bags, and the native women sewed them. The work of preparing the skins for clothing in- 159 i6o Northward over the Great Ice volved a great deal of chewing on the part of mynative seamstresses. The skin is folded once with the hair inside andthen the operator chews back and forth along theedge until the fold is thoroughly soft and pliable,when another fold is made and the process repeateduntil the whole skin has been carefully chewed ; afterthis it is scraped and worked with a blunt instrumentand then, if necessary, chewed again. It took two ofmy workers about a day to chew a big RED CLIFF IN THE WINTER NIGHT. It was not easy at first for us to accustom ourselvesto the absence of sunlight. By November 23d, therewas really no difference indoors between day andnight. Our lamps burned constantly through thetwenty-four hours. Some of us often thought in thefirst few days, Oh, we wont do this by lamplight, Through the Great Night i6i but well wait till to-morrow, forgetting that themorrow would bring no sun. Still, we did not findthe darkness oppressive, which was fortunate, for wewere not to have our darkest day for a month tocome. The darkest day of winter would reach usabout December 22d, and we woul
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjecteskimos, bookyear1898
