Pick from the Past THE UMIAK is nearly extinct. Fewer than 100
survive in the wild, and only about a dozen dull, dusty
specimens can be found in the museums of the world. Once its
range was immense: from eastern Siberia to East Greenland. The
spacious, seaworthy skin boat of the Inuit and their arctic
neighbors, the umiak was the perfect boat for whaling and walrus
hunting in the ice-choked, storm-haunted seas of the north. The
boats size permitted trade and migration, linking continents and
cultures. After the umiak was invented, wrote anthropologist
Dorothy Jean Ray, the [Bering] Strait became an intercontinental
highway, its coastal fringes occupied by peoples who had more or
less the same way of life. Today the umiak is used only in a few
localities on the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Capt. Frederick
W. Beechey of Britains Royal Navy saw umiaks in 1826 on Little
Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and took a sailors delight
in these craft, which were both light and pliable and very safe
and durable. In 1