stefansson-wrangel-09-31-074v

112 THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGEL ISLAND

likely to be stove. At the same speed, the umiak can be
jammed into an ice cake of any size and will remain unin-
jured, unless there be a rib broken—damage that need
not be repaired until the next day. In whaling and wal-
rusing 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 a whaling umiak any old way across
rough 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 call at
East Cape , Siberia, on their way to Wrangel and pick up a skin
boat cheaper there.

In an undertaking such as that of Wrangel Island,
Eskimos are almost as necessary as boats or weapons.
Not that they are wanted for hunting, for almost any
white man can soon become as good a hunter as the
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. It is the testimony of
many experts who have examined Eskimo sewing that
it is unequalled in the world. The manufacturers of
boots for hunters that are sold at our sportsmen’s out-
fitting 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. A seamstress not used to
white men’s ways will become angry if she sees the pur-
chaser greasing the seam of a boot that she has made,
for she takes it as a charge of incompetence. ¶This super-