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exclusively cedar whaleboats made on the Massachusetts coast, and these continued
to be employed used in midsummer whaling where there was little danger of striking ice.
But at such icy stations as Point Barrow and Point Hope the cedar boat competed only
two or three years with the indigenous Eskimo craft and was then discarded for-
ever. The cedar boat is so fragile that if it strikes a piece of ice the size
of a bushel basket at six miles an hour it is likely to be stove. At the same
speed the umiak can be jammed into an ice cake of any size and will remains uninjured
unless there be a rib broken - damage that need not be repaired until the next
day. In whaling and walrusing it is frequently necessary to drag a boat over a
piece of intervening ice to launch it on the other side. It will take six or eight
men to do this for a whaleboat and with the slightest accident it will be stove.
Two or three men can drag an a whaling umiak any old way across the roughed ice and dump
it again into the water without fear of injury. All these things our men knew quite as
well as anyone. But the prices asked for skin boats by the natives at Nome seem
to have been higher than they considered equitable and so they decided to stop
in at East Cape on their way to Wrangell Island and pick up a skin boat cheaper
there.

The support of Eskimos In an undertaking such as that of Wrangell
Island, Eskimos are almost as neccesary as boats or weapons.is nearly indispensable Not that they are wanted for hunting, for almost
any white man can soon become as good a hunter as tha average Eskimo; neither is
their help essential in the building of camps. But their women are needed to sew clothes and keep them in repair. But It is the testimony of many
experts who have examined the Eskimos sewing of the Eskimo women that it is unequalled in
the world. Those who make The manufacturers of boots for hunters that are sold at our sportsmen’s
outfitting stores will make the seam almost any way and then waterproof it by
rubbing in grease or some other "preparation." The Eskimo woman alone sews a seam
that is in itself waterproof. and A seamstress not used to white men's ways will
become angry if she sees the purchaser greasing the seam of a boot that she has
made, for she takes it as a charge of incompetence. This super-sewing is needed