I was in Barrow yesterday (official duties) but while I was there I took a couple of photos of the boats used to hunt bowhead whales so here they are...below is a framed boat w/o skins and a framed boat with seal skins sewed on to it...A local Captain killed two whales two weeks ago. The frame-only boat has a bowhead whale skull just behind it. This is big game hunting. (These are functional boats and in the backgound that is pack-ice on the Chukchi Sea.)





Below is pack-ice. It extends about 2-4 miles seaward from the mainland. More or less open ocean is about 2-5 miles out seaward. Polar bears are out there (really).



Here are specimens of the rare Barrow palm tree...grown from tree stumps of unknown origin (trees do not grow in Barrow or anywhere near Barrow) and from baleen palms from bowhead whales. To this day, it remains a profound and unsolved scientific question as to how baleen actually grows on these trees. It is a balmy 28 degrees..yesteday.



Folks are hunting ducks and geese up here right now..common eiders, and other duck and geese.

Great pics. Any shipwrights here to analyze and comment on the construction of the top boat? Do they use the raw hide (fresh, wet) skins to cover the boat and then let cure?

Thanks for posting.

John

JKS: I think boat-making in this part of the world is pretty specialized...the frames I looked at are very tight but unique. With skins on them, they are stunning..The skins withstand the punishment of the ice better than metal hulls..hunting big game in the arctic is tough...my cut on this whole thing is to respect our elders and all men who are boat Captians.

They used to split the thick hides with their native knives, ulus, originally made of slate, I believe, because walrus hide is really thick.

Inches thick! Skiving leather, I think it is called.

I was in Barrow in August and September, and watched those hunters whiz around through the ice floes full speed with the biggest outboard they could get on those things, as they headed out through the pack to go hunting.

Scare you half to death just watching.

Half the secret ot those boats sucessful design is the flexibility of the frame. Lots of give when banging around chunks of ice, and rough water. Wayne

One of the Eskimos I worked with showed me a black powder brass shoulder fired harpoon gun they used for whales. It weighed 30 pounds or more, and they said it had a big kick, lots of fun, run up close and then blam every thing pretty crazy for a while! Yeah, you bet! Wayne

rwj,

Great pictures guy.......I haven't been to Barrow. It's on the list.

Joe

rwj,

Thank you! It is place that I will never visit in my life time. But I find your pictures fascinating. Your description of why they chose these materials is a real eye-opener.

Guys,

I forgot to mention that I was in Pt Barrow in 1965, It was much more basic than I imagine it is today.

There was pack ice right up to the shore some days in Mid- August, you could always see it.

I understand it's melting back quite a bit and not as cold.

I think they used 40 to 50 horse Johnsons on the umiaks, bigger tthe better.
Wayne

Robert,

Thanks for sharing! I have a strong admiration for the Inupiat. Not only do they use hide for the boats skin, but the wood is all driftwood, as no trees grow within several hundred miles of Barrow.

Absolutly wonderful photos! If you're interested in this type of boat construction you might want to check out "Skin Boats of Greenland" by H.C. Peterson, he has a chapter on Umiaks.
Bob

Very nice pictures. A friend of mine would use the boat without skins as a pattern to weld an aluminum boat. I imagine that an all welded aluminum boat of the same dimensions would be great for those waters.

ray, it would have to be thick plate, or it would be beat to death, and it would fatigue and fail after a time.

Also, except for rare visiting journeys, which can be planned for more ice free weather, those boats were hunting boats, for sea mammals, and your aluminum boat would create a horrendous din, as it clanged and banged through the ice chunks and skin ice. The sound is deafening, and sound travels farther and louder through the water.

Any sound the hide boat made in the ice would be a normal sound in the arctic water and the whale seal and walrus wouldn't pay much mind.

Aluminum is tough though, we use it almost exclusively on our purse-seine skiffs here, mine is 20 feet by 10 wide, 1/4 inch plate or better in places. They take a real beating, towing the end of the seine along rocky shores to scoop up fish.

But they are real noisy when trying to sneak the seine around a school of herring in the night when the temperature is dropping and ice is forming, it's much louder than steel.

Wayne

Wayne: Thank you for the good first hand experience description of the noise factor with respect to metal vs skin on a boat. All of the boats I saw in Barrow (and here are many) that looked like these boats were described as hunting boats. The emperical reasons presented to me regarding the greatest benefits of skin boats was their ability to tolerate the pack ice (a pretty tough business) and the ease that these boats can be hauled on sleds across the pack-ice to open water. But noise, as you dscribe, would be an unwanted feature...the whales and seals can hear and see pretty well, from what I have been told, so what you say makes real good sense. It is still pretty damn amazing though.

rwj Really amazing when you realize just how old this technology is and how advanced it was and how far back in time.

The squareheads figured out that flexibility stuff when they designed their longships, for getting smacked around by the short sharp wave of the northern and artic seas.

The Tlinget Indians used rawhide to sheath their wood dugouts when they went sealing in places like Icy and Glacier Bay tough stuff Wayne

rwj

The boats are neat but I want to know more about the trees. Lord knows I’m pretty gullible are they real?

Walex

Where do you seine at? I fished out of Sand Point for a lot of years. Wish I was there right now. One thing I really miss is Ukala(sp) (dried fish). Put a little salt & pepper on it or even better some Toney’s Creole seasoning let it dry for a couple weeks and your good to go. I asked my brother-in-law to bring me some down this August when they come to visit. We’ll see

Shawn

Bluetick,

I fish southeast, started gillnetting Lynn Canal when I waw a kid, then went on to purse-seining in the 70's. Those guys who fish and live in that Shumagin-False Pass area are tough. One of my favorite guys from that area is Ruel Holmberg. Used to black-cod and halibut the Gulf, fish Sac-roe Herring. Of all the ways to eat salmon, plain old sundried lightly smoked is still my favorite. sun and air dried red salmon from that windy Lake Illiamna country is the best. wayne

bluetick: I could have more fun with this..but I will not pull your leg . Some folks collected driftwood logs that come from God-knows-where..either Siberia or Canada, I don't know. But Barrow is about 250 or 300 miles north of the tree-line. Anyway, in this case someone took pieces of baleen, which are long narrow wedges of finger-nail like material with hairy fibers along one edge, that come out of the mouth of bowhead whales...these structures help catch the small kreele or shrimp like animals that the whales live off of. Some one took some small baleen frawns or palms and nailed them to the top of pieces of driftwood...they do sort of look like palm trees. Some one was being clever and cute...I got a kick out of it.

p.s.: Anyone that can describe baleen better than me, please step in and do so..thank you.

The baleen is made up of tough and rough fibers encased in a natural finger nail like material. Looks like a hard plastic, homogenous like buffalo or rhino horn. The whale fills up his mouth (pleated and very expandable mouth) with water and little fish and shrimp like krill, and then when he expells it the small creautes are strained out through the rows of baleen.

Then he scrapes the little fish or shrimp off with his tongue as he swallows. The tongue scrapeing also exposes more of the fiber to replace the broken and split ends. A continous process.

The baleen grows out, gets brittle near the edge, the plastic like stuff gets scraped off and exposes more hairlike fiber, on and on.

All of which proves that whales are smarter than the look.

Walex

Years ago I was down in Anchorage and saw a slide show that included x-rays of boat frames from the Aleutians that are in the Smithsonain.

They were made of short pieces of drift wood and the scarfs had inlaid ivory ball and socket joints. Freakin Amazing!!!

By Russian accounts from Kodiak the natives actually adjusted the ballast in their kayaks to "tune" the flexible frames to the sea state and could maintain 7+ knots.

Amazing what a few thousand years of hard won lesons will buy.

Bob

If you can find a copy of the movie "White Dawn" you will get a good idea of how the Inuit lived in the old days.Good scenes of hunting etc.Warren Oats was one of the actors.

There is an old movie clip of Eskimo hunters at Angmagsalik on the East Coast of Greenland, early in the last century, showing their roll-over techniques in kayaks. Awesome, they were literally spinning.

The Aleut would go bottomside up and let big seas pass over their kayak, (or Baidarki as they called them)

Baranof started across the Gulf from Kodiak with a flotilla of 400 two man baidarka, and got caught in a storm off Yakutat. He could only take a few at a time aboard the small ship he had when they got tired and let them rest. Most of them were lost, but they flipped and rolled for days and let the waves wash over them, until total fatigue got them. But the skin boats flexed and took the pounding and never failed them. Wayne

Walex

Yea I know Ruel. He owned the Tern, great guy. I think Douglas or one of his other sons runs it now. In the heyday I think they had 3 boats, the Tern a 58’ Delta named
Makarta K and a smaller 54 or 56’ Delta that I can’t remember the name of right now. Like everybody else in Alaska salmon hasn’t been too good to them since the mid 90’s. 2000 was the last summer I fished and that was after about 4 years hiatus. I think I made about 20 grand that summer and the sad thing is half that was made in 2 or 3 days up towards Chignick. I fished with Norman Larson that year. If you have ever been to Sand Point you’ve heard of him and yes he is as big of a pecker head as you have heard. The man is a fishing machine though. He’ll work your arse off. It’s funny how at 35 I can miss something so bad that I hated as a kid. When your 14 to about 19 all you can think about is all the fun your friends are having that summer. No doubt it’s a great way of life though. Things are looking up for area M though, they are getting 4 days of fishing with 1 day off for all of June. That was unheared of just a few years ago. Now if they could just get a decent price, 60 cents for reds last I heard. Hay thanks for bring back the good memories and many deck loads to you this summer.

rwj

Thanks for not jeerk’n my chain, you could have had a little fun with me though. I should have known what baleen was.

Shawn

The salmon fishing in S.E. Alaska has been pretty darn good the past couple years. Power Troll permits have gone from $12,000 to $26,000 in 12 months.

Ah....Barrow. I actually interviewed for a teaching job at Ilisagvik College up there. Wound up going to the other extreme and working in Cairo. It was 109 degrees farenheit today...not a polar bear to be seen.

Best,

JohnTheGreek

Great photo's! Intresting too! I really have to get up to Alaska one of these years! These photo's got me thinking!
again Thanks!!

I haven't been on AR very long and I know this is an old thread but very interesting. I lived in Barrow for 4 years, several years ago. The walrus skin they use the eskimos call oogerook. Not sure of the spelling but it is really smelly. They end up wearing like tyvek suits while the women are splitting the hide and sewing it. then men build the umiak frame and many of them last for years. They mostly use the skin boars in the spring by regulation and they use regular power boats in the fall to catch the whales. They don't consider themselves to be "hunting" whales as they believe the whale gives himself to the captain, as such certain of the whaling captains have very good reputations and they really depend on them to go out. Barrow is on a point and only a few miles down the point past the old naval air staion are a bunch of "cabins" they go to and are refered to as "duck shack" where they shoot the eider ducks and dry the meat. If you get a chance to go it's well worth it. Barrow is now getting to be known for the numbers of Polar bears much like Churchill in Canada so in the winter it's important to be careful. One night we went out to the shop to work on snow machines (about 100 yards from where we lived) and on the way back found polar bear tracks walking on our tracks. Wonderful experience.