IN NORTHERN MISTS 



it may formerly have been otherwise. But, in any case, no 

 long time can have elapsed between the alleged final over- 

 throw of the Eastern Settlement, perhaps about 1500, and 

 the rediscovery of Greenland in the sixteenth century. It is 

 not likely that the Eskimo should have so completely changed 

 their nature in the few intervening years; those whom the 

 discoverers then found seem, from the accounts, to have 

 strikingly resembled those we find later. And if one reads 

 Hans Egede's description of the Eskimo among whom he 

 lived and worked, it appears absolutely impossible that 

 the same people two hundred years earlier should have 

 waged a cruel war of extermination against the last of the 

 Norsemen. 



There is, it is true, a possibility, as Dr. Bjornbo has 

 pointed out to me, that the mixture of race which gradually 

 took place between Eskimo and Norsemen may, for a time, 

 have produced a mixed type, which possessed a more 

 quarrelsome disposition than the pure Eskimo, and may 

 have inherited the not very peaceful habits of the Norsemen, 

 and that in this way, for instance, a possible attack in 

 1379 may be explained. But this can only have been 

 the case at the beginning of the period of intermixture, and 

 the type must have changed again in proportion as the Eskimo 

 element in race and culture became predominant.^ 



The allusion to the Pygmies of Greenland in the letter 

 to Nicholas V., quoted above (p. 86), gives us the Eskimo 

 as we are accustomed to see them; and the description of 



1 Mention should be made of two other factors, which Dr. Bjornbo has sug- 

 gested to me. It is possible that while the majority of the Norsemen were 

 compelled more and more to adopt the Eskimo mode of life in order to support 

 themselves, some more strong-minded individuals among them, and a few 

 zealous priests, may have resisted stubbornly, and this may have led to fight- 

 ing such as is spoken of in the legends. Nor must it be forgotten that the 

 relentlessness of the Eskimo is usually accentuated when dealing with in- 

 dividuals who are only a burden to the community without benefiting it; and 

 no doubt some among the Norsemen may have been reduced to such a position 

 after the cessation of imports from abroad, since they were inferior to the 

 Eskimo in skill as fishermen and sealers. 

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