stefansson-wrangel-09-31-074r

THE OUTFITTING AND VOYAGE TO WRANGEL 111

destination. The party got the distinct impression that
it had been the Captain's shrewd design to demand a
higher fee for the voyage whenever Crawford should go
to him and own up that the destination was really “some-
where east of Point Barrow.”

In our discussions before the party left Seattle it had
been agreed that, while most of what they spent money
for at Nome was optional, there were two things impera-
tive—hunting gear and Eskimo families. Under the
hunting head would come arms and ammunition, fish
nets, fish hooks, harpoons and the like. But perhaps
most important of all would be an Eskimo skin boat of
the type called an umiak. As made in western Alaska, an
umiak consists of a framework of driftwood or possibly
imported lumber, and over it stretched a covering made
either of the skins of bearded seals ,or walrus, or beluga whales. Such a
boat is very small at twenty-five feet in length, and they
run up to thirty-five feet or more. A typical boat was
one we used on our expedition of 1908-1912. It was
thirty-one feet in length. The cover was made of the
skins of seven bearded seals. It would carry in smooth
water a cargo of between two and three tons, and it was
so light that two of us could carry it overland at a
steady walk.

In the early days of Alaska whaling the whalemen used
exclusively cedar whaleboats made on the Massachusetts
coast, and these continued to be employed in midsummer
whaling, where there was little danger of striking ice.
But at such icy stations as Point Barrow and Point Hope
the cedar white man's boat competed only two or three years with the
indigenous Eskimo craft and was then discarded forever.
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