68 NATIVES OF GREENLAND. 



wild men, and were obliged to kill one of them to render 

 the others tractable ; " a most extraordinary specimen truly 

 of European refinement. 



In the settlement of Newfoundland and Canada by the 

 English and French, those Uskees who had ventured so 

 far south, and had been there established for centuries, 

 finding the strangers determined on retaining possession of 

 the country, unanimously resolved to abandon those shores, 

 which they accordingly did ; and have since fixed their 

 abode in the northern parts of Hudson's Bay, and among 

 the lakes and seas in the northern parts of North America, 

 where they now remain unmolested, except by some of 

 their warlike neighbours from the southward and westward. 



Mr. Ellis states that the severity of the cold beyond the 

 sixty-first degree causes the trees to dwindle into brushwood, 

 and that none of the human species appeared beyond the 

 sixty-seventh degree, inferring that human life could not 

 sustain the cold beyond that degree. This applies, in Mr. 

 Ellis's account, to the natives around the bottom of Hud- 

 son's Bay ; but the shores northAvard and north-westward of 

 that degree remain to be satisfactorily explored ; in which 

 event it will certainly be found that Uskees inhabit coun- 

 tries of much higher latitudes than the sixty-seventh. On 

 the Greenland side of Davis's Straits it was supposed that 

 no natives existed beyond the sixty-fourth degree ; but sub- 

 sequent research found them numerous along the coast as 



