[Illustration: A CAIRN.]
These were our diversions. Our business was to inquire into the truth
of Captain Barry's story. Pursuing our investigation through the next
three months, we learned that there had never been other than three
families of Natchillis living with the Iwillik Esquimaux. One of those,
the native who had died in the preceding winter, was an aged paralytic
called "Monkey," whose tongue was so affected that even his own people
could scarcely understand him. The second was Natchilli Joe, known to
his own people as Ekeeseek, who was a child in his mother's hood at the
time when he lived on King William Land, and only knew the story of the
Franklin expedition from hearsay. The third, Nu-tar-ge-ark, a man of
about forty-five or fifty years of age, gave us valuable information.
His father, many years ago, opened a cairn on the northern shore of
Washington Bay, in King William Land, and took from it a tin box
containing a piece of paper with some writing on it. Not far from this
same spot were the ruins of a cairn which had been built by white men
and torn down by Inuits. The cairn had been built upon a large flat
stone, which had the appearance of having been dragged to its present
location from a stony point near by. The cairn itself was found to be
empty, but it was generally believed by the Inuits that there was
something buried beneath this stone.
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