THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 471 



on Victoria Island, where no white men are known in historic times 

 to have had contact with the Eskimos, there should be more in- 

 stances of light eyes than on the north coast of Alaska after inti- 

 mate contact for half a century between perhaps a thousand white 

 men and two or three thousand Eskimos, this contact having re- 

 sulted in dozens of permanent marriages where the grandchildren 

 of the original mixed marriage are now growing up. No one who 

 has any familiarity with the history of the North can imagine that 

 these light characteristics have come in since the beginning of mod- 

 ern exploration or of whaling. 



I have in fact pointed out* that the first visitor to Coronation 

 Gulf, Sir John Franklin, describes the only Eskimo whom he saw as 

 of European-like type, and that the second, Thomas Simpson, 

 describes one of a small party whom he met as "of a distinguished 

 appearance" and "much like a Scandinavian." If in 1826 Franklin 

 saw a European-like Eskimo who was decrepit with age, and nine 

 years later Simpson saw a middle-aged Eskimo who looked "much 

 like a Scandinavian," it becomes obvious that modern European 

 admixture is out of the question. As I have in previous books 

 dealt rather fully with the origin of these European-like Eskimos I 

 shall not go into it further here. 



♦See "My Life With the Eskimo," p. 199. 



