Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/18
the northern part of the coast towards Prince Regents Inlet. On his second voyage (1821–23) Parry visited Duke of York Bay, Repulse Bay, the east coast of Melville Peninsula and the south coast of Cockburn Land, spending two winters, one at Winter Island and one at Iglulik; both Parry and his second-in-command, G. F. Lyon, give excellent accounts of the Eskimos, with whom they had lively intercourse.
Most of the later North-West Passage and Franklin Relief expeditions passed the territory of the Iglulik Eskimos; in particular, most of them put in at Ponds Inlet in order to get news from the Eskimos; but only little information can be had from their reports. In the south, Repulse Bay was the headquarters of two of these relief expeditions: Dr. J. Rae's in 1847–50 and 1853–54, by which the west coast of Melville Peninsula was mapped, and C. F. Hall's in 1864–69, with two sledge journeys to Iglulik. But neither in Rae's nor Hall's reports is there much information regarding the Eskimos; Hall's book, which was published after his death by J. E. Nourse, must furthermore be handled with great caution, as the information and illustrations in it often seem to have come from quite other Eskimo tribes (Compare the sledges pp. 85 and 221, which are presumably from West Greenland and the Polar Eskimos respectively, and the seal scratcher p. 352 and the boots p. 380, which presumably came from the Western Eskimos). Schwatka's expedition (described by Klutschak and Gilder) 1878–80 to King Williams Land, had its headquarters near Depot Island, north of Chesterfield Inlet, and they were very intimate with the Eskimos.
The works of Professor, Dr. Franz Boas are, however, of much greater importance. It is through these that this Eskimo group is first made the subject of scientific research. In 1888 he made a valuable survey of the Central Eskimo tribes; some of the information for this work he collected himself during a visit to Cumberland Gulf, Baffin Land, and he also collected everything obtainable in earlier literature. In 1901 and in 1907 he published the great collections which the whaler Captain George Comer from time to time brought home from the west coast of Hudson Bay and which are now to be found in the American Museum of Natural History and have hitherto formed one of the main sources of knowledge on the Iglulik Eskimos.
Of later expeditions I would mention A. P. Low's voyage with the "Neptune", 1903–4, when he wintered at Fullerton and also visited Ponds Inlet, and J. E. Bernier's many voyages in the "Arctic", including a winter in far north Admiralty Inlet 1910–11; these voyages have not, however, resulted in much that is new about the Eskimos.