In cutting off a mouthful of meat, the knife
passes so close to their lips, that nothing but constant habit could
ensure them from the danger of the most terrible gashes; and it would
make an English mother shudder to see the manner in which children five
or six years old are at all times freely trusted with a knife to be used
in this way.
The length of one of the best of seven canoes belonging to these
Esquimaux was twenty-five feet, including a narrow-pointed projection,
three feet long at each end, which turns a little upward from the
horizontal. The extreme breadth, which is just before the circular hole,
was twenty-one inches, and the depth ten inches and a half. The plane of
the upper surface of the canoe, except in the two extreme projections,
bends downward a little from the centre towards the head and stern,
giving it the appearance of what in ships is called "broken-backed." The
gunwales are of fir, in some instances of one piece, three or four
inches broad in the centre, and tapering gradually away towards the
ends. The timbers, as well as the fore-and-aft connecting pieces, are of
the same material, the former being an inch square, and sometimes so
close together as to require between forty and fifty of them in one
canoe: which, when thus "in frame," is one of the prettiest things of
the kind that can be imagined.
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