The men get their meal first, sitting upon the ground, round a large wooden dish, and taking the meat with their fingers. When this is over, the women,begin in the same stile, but at the opposite end of the house. If there be a European guest, or any other stranger, the woman of the house takes a piece from the kettle, licks it clean from blood and scum, and presents it to him with her own hands. It would be considered a high degree of impoliteness to decline it.
Their time of removing from their houses to their tents is not exactly fixed. It takes place generally at the end of April, or in the middle of May, as the snow melts sooner or later; and it frequently happens that part of the badly supported roof of the house gives way and falls down, an accident. which forces them to remove to the summer place. The tents are larger and smaller, in proportion to the size of the family and its fortune, but rarely exceeding the length of 12 feet, and the breadth of 10 feet. A wall one foot high is first made of stones and sods, on which they rest the poles, which form an acute angled triangle with the ground. The poleS are then covered with seal skin ; and a curtain is placed before the entrance, made from the intestines of the whale, dolphin, or seal. The bed•places are similar to those in their houses. The tents are, like the houses, near the shore, as the sea supplies them with all their wants, and the seal provides them with all the necessaries of life. The instruments to procure their food are very simple, but they are admirably adapted to their purpose. The principal of them is the harpoon, called erneinek, and unnereck, which is the largest of them all, being two yards and a half in length. The second is the lance, called angoviak ; the third a smaller lance, is called kaplzut : these three are generally used for seal game, the first to attack, the two others to kid the animal. The first was also formerly used to attack the whale; but now the Greenlanders do it in the•Euronean manner, with large harpoons. A fourth instrument, called akligak, is a kind of javelin with a head of iron, barbed, to prevent its becoming disengaged from the animal. It is generally used when they pursue their game in company. For catching birds, they use the nugit, or fowling-pike, headed with iron like the last, and furnished, towards the middle of the shaft, with three notched forks made of bone, that one of these may reach the bird, if he escapes the apex, which is of iron. For land-game they formerly used the common Indian bow, with its arrows made of fir, and stif fened with sinews of animals, with a string likewise made of sinews ; but the use of it was nearly abolished on their being provided with guns by the Europeans: although they were obliged, during the time of the late war, to resort to their old method of shooting, which succeeded very badly, from the want of that dexterity which they formerly possessed. The Greenlanders being a very pacific people, none of the dreadful instruments of war used by other Indians are found among them. They use for fishing the same appa
ratus as other nations, the lines being generally made of very thinly shaved thongs of whalebone.
Their canoes are of two different sorts; the one large and open, the other and covered. The framing of both consists of slender pieces of wood, covered on the outside with skins of seal sewed together. The wooden flaming is joined by thongs, cut from seal-skins, or by thinly shaved whalebone. This manner of putting them together, gives to the canoes so great a degree of flexibi lity, or rather elasticity, that they very seldom can go to pieces even in the most boisterous sea. The large canoe, called umiak, or the canoe for women, is generally twen ty-four or thirty feet long, four or five feet wide, and two or three feet deep, terminating acutely at both ends. The bottom is flat. It is used in summer to transport the whole family, and its utensils and tent, from one place to another ; and is in the evening always taken up on land, in order to be dried; repaired, and varnished on the outside with old thick rancid oil, called Minnek, to prevent the water from penetrating the scams.
The other small canoe is called kajak, and is only used by the men ; it is sharp at both ends, and its entire shape and appearance is not unlike a weaver's shuttle. It is from four to five yards in length from one extremity to the other, about a foot and a half wide in the middle, and scarcely one foot in depth. In its centre is a round hole, with a prominent ring of bone or wood, in which the man seats himself, and fastens the under part of his frock round that ring, forming thus one body with his canoe. Upon his kajak he has his instruments, striking the sea al ternately on both sides with a paddle called pautik, four fingers broad at each end. He can row in a very boiste rous sea, and if overturned by the billows, he is able to raise himself again. All their sea game is procured in these small boats. The boy is .employed by his father in his earliest age, that is, in• his sixth or seventh year, to prepare himself to perform the business of a man. The first sea-fowl caught by a boy gives occasion to a great festival, and dinner of the family, for the purpose of, doing homage to the rising master of the house. Another kind of sea-amusement, or rather ice-amusement, is used in winter, in the north of Greenland, from the 70th degree to the highest northern latitude, by means of sledges drawn by 6 to 12 dogs. The Greenlanders drive them over the frozen sea, a distance of 50 and sometimes more miles from the lands, to the rifts and clifts of the ice, and catch there the dolphins, sea-unicorns, and seals, which come there in great numbers to take air. The spoil is carried home by the assistance of the sledges. The velocity of the dogs is astonishing ; they may be driven 100 miles in 9 or 10 hours.