﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 1 43 



nearly to Jones's Sound, judging by its primitive astronomical data ; 

 though Thalbitzer * supposes that they did not pass the site of Uper- 

 navik. At all events they found Skrelling houses here and there 

 above the region inhabited by white men. 



According to Dr. Storm, 2 the settlers " apparently afterward 

 killed them or drove them away when they could." This looks as 

 though the colony were expanding in that direction, or the Eskimo 

 were beginning an ominous downward movement. 



Professor Olson's preface to Original Narratives, etc., before men- 

 tioned, says that " The Speculum Regale was written in Old Norse in 

 Norway in the middle of the thirteenth century," that it discusses in 

 a dry, matter-of-fact way divers Greenland matters, like insularity, 

 the aurora borealis, glaciers, climate, the fauna, exports and imports, 

 and the means of human subsistence, but has not a word for the 

 Eskimo. Surely the writer knew nothing 'definite about them, 

 although some border settler might have been able to tell him. 



It was the year 1337 at the earliest when Ivar Bardsen went with 

 a relief expedition to the western settlement, a little too late. His 

 narrative, written later in Norway, shows that the Greenland colonists 

 can have had no considerable contact with the natives before the 

 fourteenth century. The Icelanders can have had no idea of them at 

 the time Hauk's book was copied, still less a hundred years earlier 

 when the saga was written. Neither Thorfinn, nor the unknown 

 saga-man, nor the Lawman Hauk, who gives us the earliest surviving 

 manuscript, can reasonably be charged with using Skrelling in the 

 special sense of Eskimo. If the Hop natives are to be held Eskimo, it 

 must be on other evidence. 



The Saga of Eric the Red (A. M. 557) says: " They were small 

 men and ill looking, and the hair of their heads was ugly. They had 

 great eyes and were broad of cheek." The Saga of Thorfinn Karlsefni 

 substitutes " swarthy " for " small." The Flateybook Wineland Saga 

 states that the native chief was tall and of good figure. 



Stature and comeliness make an uncertain reliance. The Eskimo 

 are not all squat people. Those of southern Greenland are said 

 to be taller than those in the north. The Long Labrador Trail of 

 Dillon Wallace tells us : 



In our old school geographies we used to see them pictured as stockily built 

 little fellows. In real life they compare well in stature with the white man of the 

 temperate zone. With a few exceptions, the Eskimo of Ungava average over 

 five feet eight inches in height with some six footers. 



1 Op. cit., p. 23. 



2 Studies on the Vineland Voyages, pp. 307, 370. 



