Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Narrative of an Attempt to Reach the North Pole, Volume 2Parry, William Edward, Sir
History
Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Narrative of an Attempt to Reach the North Pole, Volume 2
Parry, William Edward, Sir
Arctic regions; Northwest Passage; Parry, William Edward, Sir, 1790-1855
The distance to which these people extend their inland migrations, and
the extent of coast of which they possess a personal knowledge, are
really very considerable. A great number of them, who were born at
Amitioke and Igloolik, had been to _Noowook_, or nearly as far south as
Chesterfield Inlet, which is about the _ne plus ultra_ of their united
knowledge in a southerly direction. Okotook and a few others of the
Winter Island tribe had extended their peregrinations a considerable
distance to the northward, over the large insular piece of land to which
we have applied the name of Cockburn Island; which they described as
high land, and the resort of numerous reindeer. By the information
afterward obtained when nearer the spot, we had reason to suppose this
land must reach beyond the seventy-second degree of latitude in a
northerly direction; so that these people possess a personal knowledge
of the Continent of America and its adjacent islands, from that parallel
to Chesterfield Inlet in 63-3/4°, being a distance of more than five
hundred miles reckoned in a direct line, besides the numerous turnings
and windings of the coast along which they are accustomed to travel.
Ewerat and some others had been a considerable distance up the Wager
River; but no record had been preserved among them of Captain
Middleton's visit to that inlet about the middle of the last century.
Of the Indians they know enough by tradition to hold them in
considerable dread, on account of their cruel and ferocious manners.
When, on one occasion, we related the circumstances of the inhuman
massacre described by Hearne, they crowded round us in the hut,
listening with mute and almost breathless attention; and the mothers
drew their children closer to them, as if to guard them from the
dreadful catastrophe.
The Esquimaux take some animals in traps, and by a very ingenious
contrivance of this kind they caught two wolves at Winter Island. It
consists of a small house built of ice, at one end of which a door, made
of the same plentiful material, is fitted to slide up and down in a
groove; to the upper part of this a line is attached, and, passing over
the roof, is let down into the trap at the inner end, and there held by
slipping an eye in the end of it over a peg of ice left for the purpose.
Over the peg, however, is previously placed a loose grummet, to which
the bait is fastened, and a false roof placed over all to hide the line.
The moment the animal drags at the bait, the grummet slips off the peg,
bringing with it the line that held up the door, and this, falling down,
closes the trap and secures him,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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