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Volume CXXXIII, Number 7 |
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Boys of Bowdoin meet Esquimaux
KATHRYN OSTROFSKY
COLUMNIST
After Professor Chadbourne, the Bowdoin boys, and the rest of the crew of the Nautilus had spent several days taking samples at their landing site in Greenland, they navigated the little schooner southward along the coast until they neared the harbor of Godthaab. At the first sight of four native Esquimaux, one of the men shouted "kayaks coming!" to the great excitement of the company.
"The Esquimaux seemed equally excited" as they guided their sleek little crafts to the schooner and were hoisted onto the deck. One Esquimau man knew a few English words, but the crewmen and the Esquimaux bridged the language barrier through the use of signs, for which the men were thankful. Both sides were glad that there was a way to communicate "while your ears may be splitting with strange sounds, and your brain splitting in vain attempts to comprehend them."
"Words," noted the writer of the Williams Quarterly article, "are as a general thing convenient, but it is not a difficult thing to go through the world without them."
While the crew were in the cabin pursuing their "chief object," to learn the Esquimau names of all of their natural history specimens, one of the Esquimaux piloted the schooner towards shore.
After they had gotten the Nautilus anchored, the crew fought a battle through the night to keep ice, which came in with the tide, from damaging the side of the ship. The icebergs generally ranged between 12 and 25 feet thick, leaving only two to four feet sticking up out of the water, but some were so large underwater that "their smaller points rose very high from the surface." These larger "ice islands" served as anchors for Esquimau fishing expeditions.
The boys observed the fishermen's exotic techniques with interest. The Esquimau hook consisted of a stone with three wire hooks protruding from the sides. To this the fisherman attached a piece of white or red cloth or a shiny piece of metal as bait and drew the contraption rapidly up and down. Because kayaks were not large enough to store recently caught fish, the fishermen would club each fish to death so it would float by the side of the boat and not swim away from the line.
One of the men brought down a Burgomaster gull with a broken wing that was flying above the boat. At that feat, the Esquimau guide "showed plainly enough that Yankee guns quite astonished him in their superiority to Esquimaux spears." The gull was only wounded, so "it became necessary to drown him" by holding his head underwater.
Since he was a water bird, he was "in no hurry to die," and the men "had a chance to try by experiment the effect of ice cold water on the hands and arms," discovering that "before two minutes had passed it seemed as though the very bones of the hand were crushed in a vice."
At the end of the day, Captain Ranlett attempted to bring the boat in to shore at Godthaab, but after examining several miles of shoreline, the Esquimau guide informed them that ice blocked all passage to shore.
Compelled to return to their former anchorage, the crew was a bit unnerved by "Arctic Artillery"-the sight and sound of a "huge berg as it burst asunder and rolled heavily into the water." Unable to go to shore themselves, they sent a message with one of the Esquimau requesting to see a certain Dr. Rink, the Inspector of Southern Greenland, "highly spoken of by northern navigators, and well known by his contributions to science and Greenlandic History."
Sadly, he was out on business, but a Danish missionary named C. H. Rosen replied to the note, assuring the crew of the Nautilus: "The Greenlander who will bring you this paper does very well know the way which your ship must follow to get in harbor, or to a safe place in the fiord. But we will send notwithstanding to-day, the main pilot as he can speak Danish."
The pilot did arrive at the Nautilus soon after the note, "but so far as we were concerned he might as well have spoken nothing but his native Esquimaux." However, the pilot did point the Captain to a sheltered cove protected from the ice.
Once Captain Ranlett's anxiety was gone, the whole crew could get a good night's rest.
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